Judicial Hijinks in Effort to Kill Walker Criminal Probe and Destroy Evidence

[Scuba]

http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/05/187683/judicial-hijinks-effort-kill-walker-criminal-probe-and-destroy-evidence

Randa. Picture courtesy of The Progressive.


In one of the first cases to rely on the U.S. Supreme Court's McCutcheon decision, a federal judge just tried to open the door to new levels of corruption in Wisconsin elections -- but the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals could still stop him. On May 6, federal Judge Rudolph Randa ordered a halt to Wisconsin's long-running "John Doe" criminal probe into allegedly illegal coordination between political campaigns (including Governor Scott Walker's 2012 recall campaign) and the non-profit groups like Wisconsin Club for Growth and its allies that spent millions during the state's recall elections. Randa, who was appointed to the bench by George H.W. Bush and is a board member of the Milwaukee Federalist Society, compared limits on money-in-politics to "the guillotine and the gulag."

His order was halted the following day by a Seventh Circuit panel made up of Judges Diane Wood, William Bauer and Frank Easterbrook, which ruled that he had not properly certified an earlier appeal from prosecutors as frivolous, a necessary step before he could halt the investigation. (Prosecutors had appealed Judge Randa's decision rejecting their motion to dismiss the case on grounds that they were subject to immunity.) On Thursday, Randa certified the appeal as frivolous and reinstated his order. Prosecutors will likely appeal again to the Seventh Circuit.

Judge Randa's May 6 decision halting the investigation is extraordinary. It involves a federal court injecting its own interpretation of state law into a high-profile criminal probe of political operatives of the party that appointed him to the bench, while state court proceedings are ongoing. It deploys a strained reading of U.S. Supreme Court precedent and the facts of the case, portraying the investigation -- led by a bipartisan group of District Attorneys and a Special Prosecutor who voted for Walker, and approved unanimously by the bipartisan group of retired judges on Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board -- as politically-motivated retaliation against Republicans. It green-lights electoral coordination between candidates and third-party groups, making it easy for politicians to bypass contribution and disclosure limits and solicit unlimited, secret donations for so-called "issue ads" timed to influence elections.

Randa even celebrated the intentional evasion of campaign finance rules by the players under investigation in the John Doe. He described their tactics as a means of promoting "speech." Randa wrote that Eric O'Keefe's WCFG -- which filed the federal challenge to the probe and had spent $9.1 million on undisclosed election ads during the recalls -- "found a way to circumvent campaign finance laws, and that circumvention should not and cannot be condemned or restricted. Instead, it should be recognized as promoting political speech, an activity that is ingrained in our culture."

More on Randa's bizarre ruling here:

How Randa and right-wing legal hatchetman Steven Biskupic once collaborated to destroy a person’s life using evidence one of the overturning judges called “beyond thin” can be found here:

Oh, and Randa has the wife of one of Scott Walker's attorneys working for him. More here:

[xchrom]

1. du rec.

[starroute]

2. It's Biskupic's wife who works for Randa

She's not just "the wife of one of Scott Walker's attorneys." It's all a lot cozier than that.

In addition, Biskupic was one of the US Attorneys involved in the Bush administration scandal and appears to have responded to the threat of losing his position both by attempting to drum up fake voter fraud cases and by going after Georgia Thompson in coordination with Judge Randa.

There are some very deep factors here involving Republican attempts to influence electoral outcomes, and I'd be surprised if this case is purely a Wisconsin affair. As I've pointed out on multiple threads, there is a small cluster of people and groups who are involved with both a certain faction of the Tea Party and Ginny Thomas's Groundswell and who appear to be behind much of what is going on.

Dan Backer, the lawyer who brought the McCutcheon case, is one of them. Backer's TheTeaParty.net and another groups that is part of this nexus, True the Vote, were the original source of the phony IRS scandal when they didn't get their tax exempt status approved immediately. And True the Vote -- which specializes in busing white suburbanites to intimidate voters in inner city precincts -- was active in the Wisconsin recall election.

The overall objectives appear to be (1) to enable unlimited amounts of dark money to flow through 403(c)(3) organizations that are not required to list their donors and (2) to disenfranchise as many poor and minority voters as possible. And the fact that Randa based his decision on a bizarrely expansive interpretation of the McCutcheon decision suggests to me that he may have gotten his talking points directly from someone in this nexus. At least, I'd give a pretty penny to find out.

[starroute]

4. Here's another example of Judge Randa's judicial overreach

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/07/31/2388461/federal-judge-catholic-church-has-a-constitutional-right-not-to-compensate-victims-of-sex-abuse/

July 31, 2013

A federal judge in Wisconsin handed down an opinion yesterday granting the Catholic Church — and indeed, potentially all religious institutions — such sweeping immunity from federal bankruptcy law that it is not clear that it would permit any plaintiff to successfully sue any church in any court. While the ostensible issue in this case is whether over $50 million in church funds are shielded from a bankruptcy proceeding triggered largely by a flood of clerical sex abuse claims against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Judge Rudolph Randa reads the church’s constitutional and legal right to religious liberty so broadly as to render religious institutions immune from much of the law.

The case involves approximately $57 million that former Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan transferred from the archdiocese’s general accounts to into a separate trust set up to maintain the church’s cemeteries. ... The issue facing the court is, essentially, whether the funds that Dolan split off into a separate trust can now be reabsorbed into the archdiocese’s assets in order to enable sex abuse victims and other creditors to be paid out of these assets. In holding that these funds cannot be so absorbed, Randa relies on a law that limits the federal government’s ability to “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion.” ... And Randa does not stop there. He goes on to argue that senior church officials get to unilaterally decide what constitutes a “substantial burden” on their faith for purposes of federal law.

[starroute]

5. Randa, Biskupic, and the Federalist Society

http://gailjonas.blogspot.com/2007/04/just-politics-or-politics-plus.html

Judge Randa has the worst record for reversals of all the federal judges in Wisconsin. Between 2000-2005, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed 50 percent of his cases. Other circuit court judges’ decisions were reversed 15 to 33 percent of the time.

Biskupic was appointed to his position by the present President Bush, Judge Randa by the first President Bush. Although Biskupic’s name appeared for a while on the list of U.S. Attorneys to be fired, in the end he wasn’t. ... And then again, maybe Biskupic managed to hang on to his job because he is a member of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. ...

Judge Randa is also a member of the Federalist Society. And maybe that’s why he bought Biskupic’s theory {in the Georgia Thompson case}, “beyond thin” though it was. ... In fact, Justices Thomas, Kennedy, Alito and Scalia are members.

[Gothmog]

3. The 7th Cir. has reversed this judge before in another political case

The 7th Cir. has reversed this judge before in another political case

The appeals panel consists of Judges Diane Wood, William Bauer and Frank Easterbrook. Wood is the court's chief judge and was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1995; Easterbrook was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1985; and Bauer was appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1974. Both Easterbrook and Bauer are former chief judges.

The same three appellate judges seven years ago reversed Randa in another criminal case with strong political overtones.

In April 2007, the panel ruled that state purchasing supervisor Georgia Thompson was wrongly convicted of making sure a state travel contract went to a firm linked to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's re-election campaign.

In that case, in which Randa sentenced Thompson to 18 months in prison, Wood called the evidence used to convict Thompson "beyond thin." The panel acted with unusual speed, ordering Thompson's immediate release from prison.

Read more from Journal Sentinel: http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/federal-judge-stops-doe-probe-for-second-time-b99265560z1-258474841.html#ixzz319igJm8C

This judge appears to have a great deal of bias in political cases