TNR’s Alec MacGillis is a very interested reader of the findings of prosecutors in a “John Doe” investigation of Scott Walker and his associates, which were released by a federal appeals court judge yesterday. After all, Alec just published a fascinating article on the race-inflected conservative “bubble” Walker inhabits, rooted in his suburban Milwaukee base. So his reaction to the new material is worth reading:
I did not go down the rabbit hole of the John Doe II investigation in my new cover story about Walker and the racial divisions and political polarization in metro Milwaukee. (The piece does quote from racially charged emails released as part of an earlier investigation—“John Doe I”—that produced guilty pleas by six former Walker aides and allies, for misdeeds that include embezzling from a veterans fund and doing campaign work on taxpayer time.) I decided that delving into the John Doe II morass might distract from the piece’s focus on how the metro Milwaukee political landscape, with its stark divides and influential local talk-radio culture, has shaped Walker and in turn been shaped by him.
But the theme of the cover story and the investigation into coordination between Walker’s team and conservative groups are not unrelated. Both are, at bottom, about the same thing: the protective bubble of adulation and affirmation in which Walker has become increasingly ensconced in Wisconsin. The cover story describes one aspect of this bubble—the astonishingly monolithic base that Walker has, with the help of the talk-radio hosts he has cultivated for years, built for himself in the nearly all-white suburbs of Milwaukee, where voters turn out at the highest rates in the country to vote for him at levels that surpass 80 percent in some communities.
The other aspect of this bubble, though, is the inter-locking network of conservative groups and donors, such as Wisconsin’s own Bradley Foundation and the Koch brothers, have since 2010 come together to boost Walker and the Republican legislators who joined him in pushing through an aggressive conservative agenda in the face of massive protests in Madison. It is worth recalling that when a prank caller got through to Walker in February 2011 pretending to be David Koch, Walker made a direct request to the man he thought was Koch: to do everything he could to offer covering fire to protect Republican legislators: “A lot of these [lawmakers] are going to need a message out there reinforcing why this is a good thing for the economy and for the state,” Walker told “David Koch.”
That is what this investigation is about, whether the “reinforcement” provided by conservative groups and donors to Walker and legislators up for recall broke the law.
To put it another way, Walker’s basic pattern of behavior is pretty clear and consistent. The question is whether we can add to the many adjectives used to describe it one more: “criminal.”
