Walker’s Money Mess

Walker’s Money Mess

After being caught laundering money, the Wisconsin governor promptly switched to the spin cycle.

By Jim Hightower

Jim Hightower

Scott Walker can’t seem to run a clean campaign.

He first won the governorship of Wisconsin in 2010 from his position as Milwaukee County executive. It turns out that some of his aides at the county job were doing campaign work for him on the taxpayers’ dime. A total of six former aides and associates were convicted of crimes for either that bit of shiftiness or stealing public money.

Now, Walker himself — along with another set of aides and a slew of corporate and right-wing front groups — is in another money mess.

State prosecutors have caught Walker & Co. laundering illegal corporate donations and out-of-state dark money into his desperate $45 million campaign in 2012 to survive a recall election.

They conspired to take millions of dollars from such “independent” spending groups as Club for Growth and the Koch brothers’ shifty outfit, Americans for Prosperity, and illegally and secretly transfer control over this gusher of cash to Walker’s machine.

Having been caught laundering money, Walker promptly switched to the spin cycle. He’s just a victim of partisan Democratic prosecutors, the governor wails, calling the investigation an abuse of the judicial system. Indeed, Walker says starchily, even a federal judge has ruled that no laws were broken, and he told prosecutors to stop the investigation and destroy the evidence they’ve collected.

Destroy the evidence? Who is this judge?

Meet Rudolph T. Randa, a staunch Republican partisan George H.W. Bush rewarded with a judgeship in 1992. More telling about his bias, however, is that Randa is the only federal district judge in Wisconsin who is a regular on the circuit of right-wing judicial junkets.

And who pays for those junkets? The Koch brothers.

To keep up with this fast-spinning saga of Scott Walker’s campaign corruption, visit the Center for Media and Democracy’s website, www.PRwatch.org.

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown.