RUSH: Some truly outrageous things that have gone on in the state of Wisconsin that have happened at the same time as — and as part of — the effort to destroy Scott Walker. A similar effort, almost identical effort was made to destroy anybody and everybody who supported him and vote for him or donated money to him.
This effort was conducted by law enforcement!
Think of it this way: What do you think the greatest fear of the innocent is if law enforcement comes calling? Have you ever thought about this? Maybe some of you have experienced it. You are totally innocent. Nevertheless, you are being pursued. What is your greatest fear? Your greatest fear is the system is gonna totally fail you and that there is nobody to stop an out-of-control cop, nobody to stop an out-of-control prosecutor, nobody to stop a corrupt judge, and that you’re gonna be had no matter the fact that you are terribly innocent.
That is a fear a lot of people have, and it was routinely occurring in the state of Wisconsin during the recall efforts of Scott Walker and during the general elections and campaigns of Scott Walker. Now, everybody knows what he went through. Everybody knows what his family went through. What nobody outside the state of Wisconsin knows — until now, because National Review has uncovered it in great detail with a story by David French.
Nobody knew what just average, ordinary nameless, faceless people who happened to just donate to him or vote for him went through as well. Midnight raids on their homes. Police with battering rams breaking down their front doors at midnight, at one or two in the morning. It was never explained why law enforcement was after them. They were forbidden to tell anybody who was going on. The neighborhood saw it all happen.
The neighborhood, people in the neighborhood wondered, “What in the world did that family do? My God, we got scared to death!” The cops didn’t have to explain anything, whatever the prosecutor wanted — and his name is one I hope you will never forget, as well as the judge involved in this. I hope neither of these names do you ever forget, because they are the essence of liberal Democrat corruption run amok with no limits and no stops whatsoever.
It is frighteningly outrageous. It’s the kind of stuff that Hollywood makes movies about that, when you watch, you might fear it, but you would never, ever dream of it really happening. That’s why it’s in a movie. So I want to try to explain in a little bit more detail what this story is about. But ultimately you’re gonna have to read it at National Review.
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RUSH: I’ve been sitting on the Wisconsin Scott Walker story. I got it Sunday night. They sent me a prepublication copy of it, a PDF file. I started reading it, and I said, “There is no way that I’m gonna be ready to do this justice by Monday,” which was yesterday. So I spent a little bit more time on it. So hopefully I’ll get to it today with just enough of a summary to intrigue you enough to make you go read it. You’ve gotta read this. You have to. It’s a National Review, and it’s by David French.
Let me give you the actual title of the story. “John Doe’s Tyranny — Wisconsin conservatives have been subjected to secretive, baseless investigations.” But that subhead doesn’t even come close to telling it is reader what he’s about to discover. It’s about the John Doe laws in Wisconsin, which we have discussed on occasion on this program. John Doe means the state can literally investigate anybody without telling them why, and they can deny them lawyers.
I mean, it’s incredible. They could literally set out to destroy you, and the only thing standing in the way of it is the honor system. If you have a corrupt prosecutor (which this story has), and if you have a corrupt judge, (which this story has), and if you have a police department that is also corrupt (this happened in Milwaukee, mostly), then you can pull this off.
There’s even a quote from a couple police officers who were forced to participate these midnight raids on innocent people who had not done a thing other than support Scott Walker. That’s all they had done, and cop car after cop car, cop after cop, SWAT teams, you name it, show up with battering rams to break into these people’s homes! They’re kicked out of their homes at midnight, at one o’clock in the morning. They’re not allowed to take anything; they’re not told why.
They’re not allowed to explain to anybody that this has happened besides the neighborhood which can see it. Years after the fact, mothers are reporting their young kids that were at home when this happened are still traumatized. People are reporting today that they get scared and traumatized and panicked when they see a uniformed police officer just walking a beat. They hightail it away.
It is the fear that I think a lot of innocent people experience when law enforcement is pursuing them. I know. I’ve been there. I know a number of things. Law enforcement’s never doubted, other than the civil rights community. The media doesn’t doubt them. Law enforcement can leak anything they want about anybody, and the media writes it, and it becomes fact. Even average, ordinary Americans say, “Why would the cops lie? Why?” I mean, they take it on faith.
“Why would a prosecutor lie? Why would a prosecutor say somebody’s guilty if they’re not? They don’t have time to waste on this. There are too many guilty people to go get to waste time on the innocent.” The innocent in Wisconsin were guilty because they were conservative. The left in Wisconsin was losing everything. They were losing their union domination and control. Scott Walker was decimating all the systems they had put in place.
They literally lashed out in panic, anger, and you name it to punish people who had voted for Walker, who had raised money for him, who they thought had voted for him. It was the kind of thing that Vladimir Putin does and we all laugh about because that’s what we expect in a tyrannical dictatorship like the Soviet Union or Russia. We find out that it can happen here and has happened here, and there was no mechanism to stop it. The prosecutor’s name is Chisholm, John Chisholm, and I hope his name is never forgotten.
He has tarnished the reputation of prosecutors all over this country. He belongs right up there with Mike Nifong. Mike Nifong is a piker compared to what happened in this case. Nifong is an amateur compared to what happened here in Wisconsin. There’s one puzzling thing about this, to me. There’s one puzzling thing about it, and that is Scott Walker doesn’t talk about it. Now, until I read the National Review piece…
You know, I knew the John Doe laws and I knew they’d been abused and I’d heard this or that. But I did not know until Sunday night just how outrageous the application of the John Doe laws has been. There’s a term that has been developed to describe what happens here. It’s “lawfare” as in warfare, except this warfare conducted by law enforcement. “Lawfare.” Walker hasn’t talked about it. I mean, everybody knows what he went through. Everybody knows the attacks on him.
What nobody outside Wisconsin knows, or very few (they will now) is the same stuff was done to hundreds of people that supported him.
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RUSH: Another piece of information about these Wisconsin raids. And, by the way, they were all innocent. Nobody was guilty of anything. They hadn’t done anything. The John Doe law allowed for anonymous prosecution. Law enforcement was simply allowed to target anybody they thought might be guilty of a crime under the terms of this law, and they had to tell nobody, including the accused. This violated the US Constitution in so many ways.
Just think of a battering ram breaking down your house. You live in suburbia, a battering ram breaking down your house at one a.m., and cops, jackbooted or otherwise, come in, steal every telephone and every computer, and you never get them back. And they don’t tell you why. You’re left to assume it. I mean, that’s just one of the things that happened.
It was all done by a bunch of aggrieved, loser at the ballot box liberal Democrats, who thought the state was forever their personal fiefdom. And then Walker had to go and beat them three times, and they just lost it, and in the process became exactly who they are. The one plus in this, if there is a plus, is that the left, in these incidents in Wisconsin, they threw down all the camouflage. They got rid of every mask. They hid behind nothing. Exactly who they are if left unchecked and unopposed, was made obvious.
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RUSH: Okay a blue state plus a big city corrupt district attorney and a popular Republican governor equals a police state reminiscent of the 1930s in Germany, and I’m not exaggerating an iota. This is the Wisconsin story to which I alluded earlier in today’s broadcast. If you compare this to Watergate… I mean, Watergate is literally Romper Room compared to this!
This is the police batter-ramming their way into homes on direct orders of a Democrat district attorney, fishing for information to use against a political enemy — and then threatening homeowners who had all of their civil rights violated! Threatening them to shut up or else. It’s the same state, Wisconsin, where union thugs trashed the state capital in hopes of intimidating the governor into letting their money-laundering operation remain in place.
I don’t say this with any jocularity or casualness at all. This is the kind of thing that should land some people in jail. This is a legitimate comparison to the 1930s in Germany. It would stick. This is a first cousin to what Barack Obama did with the IRS when he went after conservative groups. It all starts because this prosecutor, this DA, happens to be married to a woman who was a schoolteacher who got really, really mad at the changes to her own union benefits under Scott Walker.
That is literally the little germ that ignites this entire episode: A ticked off union activist teacher, married to a corrupt DA. And they then found a corrupt judge and enough corrupt police officers to facilitate every action they took, which was entirely political. There was no criminality. The people targeted here had not engaged in one iota of criminal activity. All they did was vote Republican! All they did was donate to Republican and/or conservative causes.
It would begin with a knock on the door after midnight. An armed police force, a SWAT unit could storm your house, literally use a battering ram to enter your front door if you didn’t answer within seconds. Most people were in bed when this happened. Again, these are just Ward and Cleaver families, Ward and June Cleaver families. These are not criminals. They had nothing to do with any criminal activity whatsoever — unless you consider voting Republican to be criminal.
If you didn’t answer, they used the battering ram to crash into your house, scaring your kids. Maybe for the rest of their lives in some cases. They would then storm in and steal every computer and cell phone they could find! They would not tell you why they were there. They would tell you that you didn’t have a right to know, and they told you that you better shut up about what is going on and what was happening.
If you breathed a word to anybody even in the neighborhood who had witnessed it, you would be in even further difficulty. All of this was simply based on the political advocacy that the adult residents of these homes had engaged in. All of this is the John Doe investigations that began into Scott Walker and conservative groups in Wisconsin, and they’ve been ongoing now for years. Scott Walker’s been really strangely quiet about this. We all know what happened to him.
He’s out detailing what happened to him and his family.
What we didn’t know was that the same thing was happening to scores of his supporters and donors, all under the auspices of the so-called John Doe law, the John Doe investigation. The opponents of Scott Walker turned campaign finance law into weapons. National Review’s “David French has talked to families targeted in the John Doe raids for the first time, and their stories are harrowing.” As I say, this is going to print out to 11 pages if you read it online.
“Shouting officers at the front door in pre-dawn,” late night/early morning, “raids, at least once with a battering ram. Armed police rifling through and carting off their belongings, down to and including a daughter’s computer. … The targets were told not to tell their lawyers, or their friends, or their neighbors.” Now, if you happened to live next door to a house where such a storming took place, you’d wonder why.
“My the God, what’d that family do?” you would ask. That family was forbidden from telling you. They were not permitted to discuss what happened. They were not permitted to even go get lawyers! This was not the right to remain silent. This was an order to remain silent. They couldn’t even profess their innocence! The demand to stay silent required that they assume a public role of guilt.
“The investigators were, among other things, fishing for campaign-finance violations,” supposedly, which is nothing more than a First Amendment right! Campaign donations are the equivalent of free speech. Numerous courts, including the Supreme Court, have so found. “So, for exercising their First Amendment rights, some targets were denied their First Amendment rights. … The investigations have been such a long-running farce that there is John Doe I and II.
“As Scott Walker’s first campaign for governor got underway in 2010, the Milwaukee district attorney, John Chisholm, opened the initial John Doe investigation under a proviso of the law that allows officials to keep their targets secret and to compel them to [shut] up.” John Chisholm, C-H-I-S-H-O-L-M, the DA, “[a] partisan Democrat whose wife was a shop steward for a teachers union,” and she was miffed that Scott Walker was elected and began to implement his reforms of corrupt union activities in Wisconsin.
Chisholm’s wife literally had a cow, went berserk. So, “Chisholm investigated everything possible related to Walker for [two] years, without really laying a glove on him.” Everybody knows that’s followed this. They tried. They threw the kitchen sink at Walker, and nothing stuck. “It was in the run-up to Walker’s re-election campaign…” You know, the first thing they tried was a recall election, and they fired everything at him then, and they were going after his supporters then.
He won the recall election, then he ran for legitimate reelection.
That’s when they went and got a judge to join this corrupt effort!
“John Doe entered its next phase of harassment of conservative groups. Investigators swept up personal e-mails, and issued wide-ranging subpoenas, including information on donors. The Wisconsin Club for Growth describes in court filings how its activities were hindered, as people began refusing meetings, donors got nervous, and one of its key officials, Eric O’Keefe, wasn’t allowed to explain the nature of the investigation.”
They literally were trying to scare and intimidate conservatives — conservative donors, conservative voters — as much as they could. They wanted to frighten them and intimidate them into abject fear and silence. “O’Keefe, who has been courageous in resisting the investigations, has said, ‘The process is the punishment,'” the punishment for voting for Walker, the punishment for being Republican. The process, the investigation was the punishment. The “offense was backing the wrong side” in this political race in Wisconsin.
“[A]rmed agents of the state, operating with the force of law, to be used as essentially a political cudgel. The John Doe investigation has bogged down under the weight of its own [corruption and] unfairness, and various court challenges” successfully lodged against it. “The Wisconsin Supreme Court could soon rule to halt the investigations altogether…” This is all still going on in one form or another!
“[T]he United States Supreme Court is set to decide whether it will consider a federal lawsuit brought by Eric O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth. Wisconsin legislators are considering scaling back the law enabling John Doe investigations to prevent future abuses.” They have to do something, ’cause I think this is every innocent person’s fear when they contemplate running up against law enforcement.
They know they don’t have any power, and if they run into people that are out to get ’em just because they want to get ’em, they know they can be had. You have it all here. You have a corrupt Democrat prosecutor, an angry wife of the prosecutor who is a shop steward union activist and schoolteacher, and then a judge. The judge has been successfully called out by a number of other legal authorities.
She’s been humiliated for her role in this.
But she doesn’t feel the humiliation because she’s not capable of it.
To casual observers what’s happened to her in being called out is humiliation. Chisholm is the name that you need to remember, and I’ve gotta find the name of the judge in this case as well. But every sordid detail and the drama that is associated with it can be found at National Review and National Review Online. David French is the article author, and he’s dug deep. The details come from these families who now are speaking up, and they’re doing so in great detail.
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RUSH: The judge, without whom this case could not have happened, is Barbara Kluka, K-l-u-k-a, and I’ll tell you what she did. She came along in the second John Doe investigation, and she approved every petition, every subpoena, every search warrant in the whole case in less than one day’s work. She enabled law enforcement to raid these innocent citizens’ homes. She’s since recused herself from this, but not before she enabled all of this to happen in the second phase of the John Doe 2 case here.
In the second John Doe case, the DA, John Chisholm, had no real evidence of wrongdoing by anybody. It didn’t stop him. Conservative groups were active in issue advocacy, which is protected by the First Amendment. It didn’t violate any campaign finance laws. Issue advocacy is politics 101. These people were targeted because they’re conservatives and liberals. As I say, what happened here in not only the treatment Scott Walker got, but everybody else, this is liberalism run amok without any checks, without any opposition, without anybody pushing back, and in its own way California is the same example.
Despite the fact that there were no violations of the law in any away, the DA, Chisholm, convinced “prosecutors in four other counties to launch their own John Does, with Judge Kluka overseeing all of them. Empowered by a rubber-stamp judge, partisan investigators ran amok. They subpoenaed and obtained (without the conservative targets’ knowledge) massive amounts of electronic data, including virtually all the targets’ personal e-mails and other electronic messages from outside e-mail vendors and communications companies. The investigations exploded into the open with a coordinated series of raids on October 3, 2013. These were home invasions,” including the ones that I have detailed previously in this half hour.
You really have to read whole thing. As I say, I could devote much of the show to reading the whole article, but I’d lose you, no matter how good in interpretative reading I would engage in, I’d still lose you. This is something that’s so detailed, you’ll read a paragraph two or three times just to absorb it.