More Files Found In Wisconsin’s John Doe Case

On May 23, the Wisconsin Department of Justice (WisDOJ) received a call from the state’s ethics board. An employee rummaging around in the basement of the building had found a filing cabinet full of material from the now-defunct “John Doe” investigations into the state’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, and his supporters.

WisDOJ was investigating the illegal 2016 leak to the Guardian of confidential details from the investigations, and in January, it had ordered that all John Doe records be turned over immediately. Yet this unexpected trove appeared four months later. The new evidence included three hard drives, 10 optical disk drives, a thumb drive, and paper files, which contained nearly 500,000 private emails and text messages collected from Republican political aides and staffers between 2009 and 2012. Among the millions of pages were discussions of the most personal nature—Wisconsin GOP staffers talking with family members about illness, helping friends through precarious relationships, and discussing money troubles with their spouses. Not knowing government bureaucrats were monitoring their discussions, some saved sensitive passwords in Gmail accounts; others sent pictures of themselves trying on clothes to friends and asked how they looked. Many of these messages were filed in a folder marked “opposition research…”

In 2012, the Milwaukee County district attorney asked for a second John Doe probe, into Walker’s gubernatorial campaign. This one gained national notoriety in October 2013, when law enforcement officers began making paramilitary-style, pre-dawn raids on the homes of unsuspecting private citizens. With floodlights trained on the targets’ homes, armed officers threatened to beat doors down with battering rams; rifled through rooms; and seized phones, computers, and bank records without allowing the subjects to contact their attorneys. Groggy families awakened to the sound of police boots running through their homes were told that they could not tell anyone what had happened.

Their crime? Supporting conservative causes in Wisconsin…

One former Senate aide says he had spent two weeks in Wisconsin’s North Woods in 2012 volunteering for a Republican candidate, and for this innocuous act, three years of his emails were seized.

Again, these are defective amygdalae in high gear, which are driving action frantically, and which lack the pathways to constrain behavior within any bounds. We will see more of this as the Apocalypse closes in, so learn from what we have seen. And recognize none of us have the experience to logically predict what will come. Someone who lived through the most brutal days of the KGB would expect what we now will emotionally perceive as impossible. They saw conditions like we will see in the future, and we have not, so we are not prepared to extrapolate.

Then there is the practical understanding. If they were raided, they were being watched every moment to see who they talked to, so they could be charged. Know that under those conditions, real operation is exceedingly difficult and you need to be paranoid.

I’ve been preaching that the intel game was being played in politics, and you should internalize that fact. Always operate as if someone is watching, because as we careen toward Apocalypse, increasingly someone always will be.

Recognize the new normal.

Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because fi they are watching, you are telling two (or more) for one