Through intimidation of opponents, spying, and invasive subpoenas that scare away donors, the Jan. 6 committee is John Doe for all of America.
Fifteen months after Congress certified the 2020 election, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hand-picked Jan. 6 commission is still forging ahead with partisan theater.
The committee has seized bank records of peaceful protesters, routinely made up evidence to tarnish Republican leaders, spied on federal lawmakers’ phone records, threatened press freedom, and is now admittedly trying to criminalize GOP’s fundraising on the issue of election security, as The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway reported last month.
The unserious committee has been exploiting the Capitol riot for political ends since it happened, but as time passes, Democrats’ abuses of power become more brazen — and they call to mind some of the most egregious instances of neglect of the rule of law and civil liberties in our country’s recent history.
The yearslong and still ongoing Russia collusion hoax comes to mind. The committee’s conduct has drawn parallels to Watergate as well, most recently with its attempts to subpoena opposition records, which would include financial records from the Salesforce database as well as personal, sensitive information about Republican donors and other party supporters.
As the National Republican Senate Committee wrote in an amicus brief, “What the Salesforce subpoena demands is for the company to hand over the ‘Holy Grail’ of the RNC’s internal digital playbook.”
But there’s another comparison — one that carried massive implications for national politics and the rule of law: Wisconsin’s infamous John Doe investigation of former Gov. Scott Walker and his supporters.
The John Doe Investigation
It all started back in 2010, when Walker was still county executive of Milwaukee and running for governor. Based on a report that public funds had been stolen from an annual military event, Walker opened an investigation, which came to be known as John Doe I.
Wisconsin has a provision for these legal proceedings, called John Doe investigations. Like grand juries, they’re intended to determine whether a crime has been committed and, if so, who committed it.
Unlike grand juries, however, these are not conclusions drawn not by a jury of peers but investigations helmed by a single judge. Not only can law enforcement subpoena witnesses, but they can issue gag orders that prevent those witnesses from saying anything publicly about the investigation, granting an inordinate amount of secrecy to those overseeing it.
Six people were convicted as a result of John Doe I. By this point, Walker had secured the governorship and by 2012 was facing a union-fueled recall effort, which he weathered and won.
After Walker won the recall election, however, a judge gave the overseeing district attorney the green light to grow the scope of the John Doe investigation — except this time it targeted Walker himself for supposedly breaking campaign finance laws. The DA was John Chisholm, the same DA who became infamous in November 2021 when a criminal he let off with exceptional leniency murdered six people and injured more than 62 others when he plowed an SUV through an annual Christmas parade.
The overreaches of the investigation were extreme and chilling. Prosecutors targeted not only Walker and conservative organizations in the state but also his supporters. For instance:
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