Although Scott "Desperado" Walker, his billionaire backers, and media tools would like you to believe otherwise, it is they who are grasping for straws in their efforts to kill the investigation.
From PR Watch: Rumors of the Walker Probe's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated...
After a January 30, 2015 ruling from Milwaukee-based federal Judge Charles Clevert, some declared that the "John Doe" probe into alleged campaign finance violations by Governor Scott Walker's campaign was dead.
(snip)
For over two years, Republican and Democratic prosecutors in Wisconsin have been part of a criminal investigation into whether Governor Walker’s campaign coordinated with “independent” electoral groups, particularly Wisconsin Club for Growth, which spent $9.1 million on the recall elections and funneled millions more to other groups. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Board also supported the investigation, with Board Chair Gerald Nichol--a former Republican elected official--recently noting the Board was presented with "credible, hard evidence" the law had been violated. The probe is conducted under Wisconsin's "John Doe" procedures, which is like a grand jury but conducted in front of a judge.
(snip)
The Walker probe is not dead. The future of the investigation--and with it, Wisconsin campaign finance law--now rests with the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Although the state's highest Court has its own conflicts of interest in the case, raising questions about whether the Court's Republican majority can be impartial, the Walker investigation is far from resolved.
All the juicy legal details are available at the article linked above, but I've culled them from the blockquote because (below the fold) I intend to dive further into the conflicts of interest mentioned in the last paragraph.
A bit of a history lesson is in order. All bolding in the following blockquotes is mine.
From the New York Times: Justices Tell Judges Not to Rule on Major Backers...
Elected judges must disqualify themselves from cases involving people who spent exceptionally large sums to put them on the bench, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday (6/8/09) in a 5-to-4 decision.
(snip)
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a decision that split along familiar ideological lines, said the Constitution required disqualification when an interested party’s spending had a “disproportionate influence” in a case that was “pending or imminent.”
Monday’s decision concerned an extreme case, and it announced a vague and general standard that will be refined and applied in the lower courts. The justices in the majority said they did not intend “unnecessary interference with judicial elections.”
The
Brenner Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law noted that In a controversial 4-3 decision in October 2009, the Wisconsin Supreme Court:
...voted to grant two petitions that flouted the spirit – if not the very letter – of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2009 ruling in 'Caperton v. Massey. Caperton held that the constitution’s due process clause prohibits a judge from hearing the case of a party who spent substantial funds to place the judge on the bench. Under the rules adopted by the Wisconsin justices in October, though, no amount of campaign spending – whether in the form of direct contributions or independent expenditures – could be the lone basis for a judge’s recusal.
The Supreme Court of Wisconsin voted to adopt the misguided rules in October by a razor-thin 4-3 vote. The court’s two newest members – Annette Ziegler and Michael Gableman, who formed half of the four-justice majority in favor of the rules – are the recent beneficiaries of exorbitant campaign spending by the very group that wrote one of the petitions adopted by the court, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC).
Again, from PR Watch:
Justices in Walker Criminal Probe Face Conflicts of Interest...
Wisconsin Club for Growth (WiCFG) and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC) played a key role in electing the four justices in the majority, in most cases spending more than the candidates themselves.
A bipartisan group of prosecutors allege that the Walker campaign illegally coordinated fundraising and expenditures with WiCFG and WMC (and perhaps other groups) during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections. Representatives of the Walker campaign, WiCFG, and WMC could face criminal liability if prosecutors find that they conspired to evade campaign finance disclosure requirements and contribution limits.
Did everybody catch that? The Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce is a group accused of colluding with the Walker campaign and breaking campaign finance laws. They are the ones requesting that the State Supreme Court kill the John Doe Probe. They contributed to all four conservative justices on the court. They helped write the rules that those four justices (and those four justices alone) voted for themselves which say they don't have to recuse themselves on cases involving their donors. Get it?
If that's not a conflict of interest, then nothing is. If that's not corruption, then we need a new definition of the word. Here's the kicker! If these four Justices (Prosser, Gableman, Roggensack, and Zeigler) are not subjects of the John Doe Probe, then they need to be. If they don't recuse themselves then the SCOTUS needs to take this up. If they don't, or if they rule in favor of their Wisconsin counterparts, then we are ALL screwed... not just us VICTIMS in Wisconin.