‘Permanently Destroy’ Scott Walker Evidence Rules Court Stacked With Conservative Judges
[su_publirb]
The Wisconsin Supreme Court handed Scott Walker a huge political victory by declaring that he broke no campaign finance laws and that all evidence in the case must be permanently destroyed.
“To be clear, this conclusion ends the … investigation because the special prosecutor’s legal theory is unsupported in either reason or law,” Justice Michael Gableman wrote in a majority opinion effectively ending the so-called John Doe probe into Walker’s fundraising.
The sweeping nature of the ruling by a sharply divided court — in which four conservative justices sided with Walker and two liberals with the state prosecutor — pulls the plug on a three-year probe that threatened to expose new details about millions of dollars in secret contributions the Wisconsin governor personally solicited from wealthy donors to defend his record during a bitter 2012 recall election.
But the ruling seems unlikely to end the political controversy spurred by the probe, which had become a lightning rod in the broader debate over the role of so-called dark money in American politics. Critics immediately noted that two of the justices on the court who ruled in Walker’s favor had been elected with $10 million in contributions from outside advocacy groups, which don’t disclose their donors and which were the very subjects of the Walker investigation.
And the prospect that voluminous records, including emails and memos written by Walker and his top campaign aides, will now be destroyed could well become an issue for transparency advocates.
[su_facebook]
[su_center_ad]
