June 3, 2014
CONTACT: Friday Thorn, friday_thorn@prwatch.org

Oligarchy Response Team Needed, Koch Attack in Wisconsin

Dear CMD Supporter:

They're back! As soon as the Koch brothers heard that the democratic candidate for governor had pulled even in the polls, their operatives unloaded close to a million dollars in ads, backing their man Scott Walker.

This is on top of a dramatic week of twists and turns in the ongoing John Doe criminal probe into Scott Walker’s 2012 recall campaign and the dark money groups that spent millions to get him elected, like Club for Growth, which received big money from the secretive funding network orchestrated by the Koch team.

The oligarchy is fighting back and we are hot on their trail.

CMD Breaks News: CMD was the first to report that Judge Randa, who tried to stop to the state investigation and told prosecutors to destroy evidence, is the only Wisconsin federal district judge who regularly participated in judicial junkets funded by whom? You guessed it, the Kochs. Our story was picked up by MSNBC's Chris Hayes last week on his show "All In." Now legal scholars and even the conservative Waukesha District Attorney are suggesting Judge Randa should recuse.

Walker in Settlement Talks: In the meantime, we learned that Walker is negotiating a settlement with the John Doe prosecutors, and Wisconsin Club for Growth and right-wing media are frantically trying to intimidate Walker into not settling their suit because it undermines their claims that the investigation is baseless, although the five criminal prosecutors investigating the case disagreee.

Now a trove of over 40,000 emails from the first John Doe investigation is slated to be released and we need to dig through that material line by line.

CMD has been at the forefront of reporting and analyzing Wisconsin’s criminal investigation into dark money -- see a full list of our reports here. But we can't do this work without you.

To follow the big money, small donations from people like you really help. Can you donate today?

Thank you for your support.

Lisa Graves for the Center for Media and Democracy and The Progressive Inc.