MILWAUKEE – Partisanship in the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office is not new. What is new this week is a specific allegation that Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm (D) felt it was his mission to stop Gov. Scott Walker (R) and was willing to knowingly use his prosecutorial powers for a partisan purpose.

“[Chisholm] felt that it was his personal duty to stop Walker from treating people like this,” an unnamed attorney who formerly worked in the DA’s office told investigative journalist Stuart Taylor Jr. of the American Media Institute. Taylor’s interview with the anonymous attorney was a bombshell revelation providing skeptics of Chisholm’s actions with ample material to support their case.

Media Trackers previously exposed that 43 attorneys and staff members in the DA’s office signed petitions to recall Walker from office. Media Trackers also exclusively discovered that David Budde, the lead investigator working on the first John Doe probe, had a Democratic Party of Wisconsin “Recall Walker” sign in his yard, and an AFL-CIO blue fist poster, an emblem of opposition to Walker’s reforms, on his front door.

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Under Chisholm’s leadership, the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office led two wide-ranging secret probes – called John Doe investigations – aimed at Walker and his reforms. One morphed in the 2010 campaign into a probe targeted at Walker and his close political hands, and another one that started after the recall elections aimed at conservative groups perceived as supportive of Walker or his policies.  A federal court has shut down the second John Doe, although ongoing lawsuits between prosecutors and defendants continue. The first probe concluded without Walker being charged with any wrongdoing.

Taylor explains what his source told him about Chisholm this way:

Chisholm told him [the source] and others that Chisholm’s wife, Colleen, a teacher’s union shop steward at St. Francis high school, a public school near Milwaukee, had been repeatedly moved to tears by Walker’s anti-union policies in 2011, according to the former staff prosecutor in Chisholm’s office. Chisholm said in the presence of the former prosecutor that his wife “frequently cried when discussing the topic of the union disbanding and the effect it would have on the people involved … She took it personally.”

An atmosphere of partisanship pervaded the office – perhaps beyond the 43 people who signed recall petitions against Walker – according to Taylor’s story:

The culture in the Milwaukee district attorney’s office was stoutly Democratic, the former prosecutor said, and become more so during Gov. Walker’s battle with the unions. Chisholm “had almost like an anti-Walker cabal of people in his office who were just fanatical about union activities and unionizing. And a lot of them went up and protested. They hung those blue fists on their office walls [to show solidarity with union protestors] … At the same time, if you had some opposing viewpoints that you wished to express, it was absolutely not allowed.”

Partisanship in district attorneys’ offices is not an exclusively Milwaukee County problem. Susan Happ, the Democratic nominee for Wisconsin attorney general, signed a petition to recall Gov. Scott Walker while serving in her current job as Jefferson County District Attorney. On Tuesday, Happ received the endorsement of United Wisconsin. United Wisconsin helped lead the effort to recall Walker in 2011 and 2012.

Authored by Brian Sikma

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Published with permission