The fact that Scott Walker handily won the re-election for Wisconsin Governor’s seat hasn’t put a stop to the partisan John Doe investigation against him, but some recent revelations show just how maniacally devoted its supporters are in this witch hunt. Now, we find out that the state’s Government Accountability Board, which oversees campaign finance, lobbying, elections, and ethics, has behaved just recklessly and unscrupulously, if not more so, as Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, the man who launched the investigation. Over at Heritage’s Daily Signal, M.D. Kittle has an excellent run down of the latest developments in the case, based on some documents that have come to light. To wit:

• On July 21 of this year, the retired judges who oversee the GAB voted to end the investigation 3-2, but the rest of the agency continued it regardless.
• The rest of the agency tried to defend these actions by saying that they notified the chair of the board of judges of their activities. Unfortunately for them, Wisconsin state law requires that the entire board be notified of such actions.
• In fact, Kevin Kennedy, the agency’s director and general counsel, and Jonathan Becker, who heads the ethics division of the board, “involved the GAB in the secret probe at least two months before the full board knew about it.”
• Unsurprisingly, both of these men might have misled the board about when the learned of the John Doe investigation.

You can read the article for the full rundown, but that’s the basic summary. If nothing else, their takedown of the flimsy at best justification for continuing the investigation against the board of judges’ wishes is worth seeing. Kittle also writes for the Wisconsin Reporter, which has been doing excellent work covering the John Doe investigations (there have been two against Walker) and explaining just why they are full of bunk. In particular, there’s a much more detailed explanation of these newly discovered documents here.

While it isn’t mentioned in the Heritage post, it’s also important to note that these documents reveal that GAB’s staff and district attorneys used private Gmail accounts to avoid public scrutiny of what they were saying. Of course, the mainstream media has been silent on this development. The Wisconsin Reporter has been the only site covering this development, which like all these other revelations should be major news stories, especially in Wisconsin.

Governor Scott Walker’s one of the best Republicans in elected office right now. He’s managed to push the political conversation in Wisconsin rightward while enacting a common sense, right of center agenda. We need to make every effort we can to defend him.