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Scott Walker can’t seem to run a clean campaign.
He first won the governorship of Wisconsin in 2010 from his position as Milwaukee Country executive. But it turns out that some of his aides at the county job were doing campaign work for him on the taxpayers’ dime – and three of them were convicted of crimes for that bit of shiftiness.
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Now, Walker himself – along with another set of aides and a slew of corporate and right-wing front groups – is in another money mess. State prosecutors have caught Walker & Company laundering illegal corporate donations and out-of-state dark money into his desperate $45 million campaign in 2012 to survive a recall election. They conspired to take millions of dollars from such “independent” spending groups as Club for Growth and the Koch brothers’ shifty outfit, Americans for Prosperity, illegally and secretly putting this gusher of cash under the control of Walker’s machine.
Having been caught laundering, Walker promptly switched to the spin cycle. I’m a victim of partisan Democratic prosecutors, he wails, calling the investigation an abuse of the judicial system. Indeed, he says starchily, even a federal judge has ruled that no laws were broken, and he told prosecutors stop the investigation and destroy the evidence they’ve collected.
Destroy the evidence? Who is this judge? He is Rudolph T. Randa, who was a staunch Republican partisan when he was rewarded with a judgeship in 1992 by George H.W. Bush. More telling about his bias, however, is that Randa is the only federal district judge in Wisconsin who is a regular on the circuit of right-wing judicial junkets. And who pays for those junkets? The Koch brothers.
To keep up with this fast-spinning saga of Scott Walker’s campaign corruption, connect to the Center for Media and Democracy: www.prwatch.org.
“Gov. Walker’s Campaign Violations,” The New York Times, June 21, 2014.
“Wisconsin Governor at Center Of a Vast Fund-Raising Case,” The New York Times, June 20, 2014.
“Walker wins Wisconsin recall election flooded with outside spending,” www.publicintegrity.org, June 5 2012.
“Meet The Republican Judge Fighting To Bail Scott Walker Out Of A Criminal Investigation,” www.thinkprogress.org, May 11, 2014.