I don’t think that law means what you think it means:
Opening the manila envelope, the Wisconsin conservative learned that government agents had secretly seized his emails – professional and personal – sent and received over a two-year period beginning Jan. 1, 2009.
He found out he had, without his knowledge, been dragged into Wisconsin’s notorious John Doe investigation, one of perhaps dozens of individuals who in recent days have received similar notices from former John Doe special prosecutor Francis D. Schmitz.
Some, like the conservative who spoke to Wisconsin Watchdog on Tuesday, had no idea they had been under surveillance in a massive, politically driven spy operation.
“Just unbelievable,” said the conservative, who asked not to be identified. He remains active in Wisconsin politics. “It feels like a different country. It feels like something that shouldn’t be done in the United States of America…”
The number of court-ordered notices underscores how widespread the abusive investigation was… “They are not high profile people and they are not all directly connected to organizations or activities that formed the basis of the investigation…”
“Are they still watching me? Why were they watching me in the first place? Why did they want these records? What did they do with my records? Do they still have them? Are they going to destroy them? Who has seen these records? It starts to make you wonder in the age we live in, where are your personal details going?”…
The illegal search and seizures turned up everything from bank records to political donor lists…
And now one Wisconsin conservative, who says he was connected to Walker only by party and political ideology at the time he had his emails secretly confiscated, has learned he was unwittingly caught up in the political probe… “And to only get a letter that says we took your electronic records and we are not going to tell you what we did with them, or if we still have them, we’re not going to tell you anything but that we took them, is very disturbing.”
Note that the mistake this prosecutor made was pulling a prominent conservative in for questioning named Eric O’Keefe, slapping a court order on him demanding that he not say anything about the investigation, and assuming he would simply obey the court order like a good little peon. Had O’Keefe and everyone else remained silent as they were legally required to do, the investigation would probably still be going on. The prosecutor would be pulling everyone’s bank records, financial statements, phone records, emails, text messages, and web history, and nobody would be the wiser. They would also still be doing the things we haven’t heard about. It was that reckless move, exposing the operation to the targets, that burned the entire operation.
Instead of staying silent, O’Keefe and the other targets fought back and everything unraveled.
I would be surprised if the prosecutor hadn’t had his investigative office coordinate with another agency for a more comprehensive suite of technical monitoring on the higher value targets as well, and nobody has found out yet. I would not be surprised to find out that they also threw an in-person element with vehicle and foot on some of the bigger players as well, to gather any potential blackmailable information. I find it hard to believe some surveillance wasn’t deployed if they were pulling bank, phone and email records. Surveillance would be a natural add on to that, and I am sure the prosecutor’s office maintains contracts for surveillance investigators.
If an outside agency that performed the surveillance maintained the records of it, or if it was done by a private sector contractor as part of a standing contract with the prosecutor’s office for surveillance investigators, it is possible there is no record of that surveillance operation in the prosecutor’s office. Submit a subpoena or FOIA to the prosecutor’s office, and it will honestly come back non-responsive. From a records standpoint, it would be as if the surveillance never happened. That is by design.
I would imagine that these types of semi-legal operations are scary to be running. If they burn, your entire career goes down the drain with them, as we will soon see with this prosecutor. Given that, blackmail can offer the prospect of control of a very uncontrollable situation, and in that office, you have all the tools just laying there in front of you. My guess is O’Keefe isn’t seeing prostitutes on the side, doing drugs, having an affair, or engaging in illegal activity, and that proved very inconvenient in this case.
Bear in mind, the problem with this was the prosecutor was a ham-handed amateur more focused on muscling everyone under and asserting his power over them to their faces, than maintaining the operational security of an illegal surveillance/investigation operation. Imagine if he had been more of an intelligence professional, and focused himself more on covert intelligence gathering, and less on trying to humiliate everyone he happened across. He would have been genuinely dangerous.
Obama promised a fundamental transformation of the country. More and more it is looking like it happened.
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
Another reason for me to stay squeaky clean.
Of course, when you’ve got a motivated, enthusiastic wife the prostitutes don’t really hold much allure, and alcohol, nicotine and caffeine are plenty strong enough. Add in a natural tolerance to cannabis, and there’s not much there for me. I’m sure they’re busy thinking up a frame up, but the problem is that frames tend to fall apart.
Things like this, and the Duke Lacrosse case, EPA abuse cases, and others make me thing that one of the things we need is a reform of the “sovereign immunity” laws. That is agents of the Government (fed, state and local) can not be held civilly liable for their actions in pursuit of their duties.
This would have to be done with care as to not allow people like John Gotti to abuse the reduced law, but the DA in the Duke case should have been held personally liable for his abuses. The DA in this John Doe case also. I’d argue that any person who abuses the public trust should be held liable civilly. And I know that this could cause problems for a K President. But there is no down side (other then a loss for the gov’t) for the bad actor to do these things.
Obviously care would have to be taken, but the principle is well established that those making decisions and those carrying out those orders have a responsibility to act in good faith. When they fail to act in good faith, they should be punished personally by criminal or civil proceedings
We’ve actually got a robust system that we use with the police, the doctrine of Qualified Immunity. That holds that cops aren’t personally liable for things they do in the line of duty, assuming 1) that they aren’t acting out of actual malice, or, 2) they aren’t violating a Well Established Right (meaning something that you obviously have the right to do, like picket on a sidewalk.)
The problem is, prosecutors and judges enjoy Complete Immunity, meaning that you can’t go after them personally at all. Period. I worked on a case where we had pretty much proved actual malice from a prosecutor who set up two guys for murder with life sentences, knowing that they were innocent. The state argued complete immunity, and the judge asked them point blank, “Are you telling me that you think that the law is that (the prosecutor) could get on 60 Minutes on national television, and say, ‘I knew these guys were innocent but I illegally framed them for it because I hate Mexicans’ and there’s nothing I could do about it?”
And the state answered, “yes, Your Honor.” And then they went on to prove it with case after case. If we just changed prosecutors and judges to Qualified Immunity, I think that quite a lot of the shenanigans would go away.
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