Son of John Doe Investigation Update

by … Donna Cole

In what the Wall Street Journal calls “a big victory for the First Amendment”, they report Friday a Wisconsin judge quashed subpoenas used by the Milwaukee County D.A. to intimidate and harass conservative groups who support Gov. Walker in their second John Doe investigation of the governor. The judge ordered all property, such as computers, to be returned to the subpoena targets.

Judge Gregory A. Peterson wrote in his ruling “There is no evidence of express advocacy” and therefore “the subpoenas fail to show probable cause that a crime was committed.” The Journal explains this as “prosecutors essentially invented without evidence the possibility of criminal behavior to justify the subpoenas and their thuggish tactics.” In other words, John Doe Jr. is yet another baseless witch hunt.

The Journal continues with “Democrats would love to intimidate and muzzle the local activists who rallied to Mr. Walker’s recall defense” and “The John Doe process has become a political weapon intended to serve partisan ends regardless of the law. Kudos to a judge who was brave enough to read the law and stop it, but there’s more free-speech defending to do.”

While the Journal calls this a victory, they do note that “The John Doe probe isn’t over, and no doubt (the Milwaukee County D.A.’s running the investigation) will appeal the ruling to quash. But that should give the subpoena targets an opening to expand their defense beyond merely stopping this political trolling exercise. They can marshall constitutional arguments that should aim to dismantle the prosecutorial machinery of these illegal campaign-finance investigations.”

One would think that a halfway decent district attorney would now drop this, but given that Milwaukee County D.A. John Chisholm, his henchmen and stooges seemingly have hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of taxpayer dollars to waste on their politically motivated wild goose chase, and that there are plenty of other liberal judges in Wisconsin who will disregard the law to try to take down Walker (like the one who granted these subpoenas in the first place), I am sure they will continue to grasp at straws.

Democrats should be very weary of using these tactics and abusing the legal system for political vendettas. There are Republican district attorney’s in this state as well, and remember the old saying, “You can indict a ham sandwich.” Some of these Democrat politicians and liberal political advocacy groups could start looking like fat pigs to those D.A.’s, and they might drag them into court just to hear them squeal too.

by … Donna Cole