MADISON - A judge said Monday that he shouldn't have authorized the release of some details included in Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel's report on a secret probe of Gov. Scott Walker's recall campaign.
Jefferson County Circuit Judge William Hue said he hadn’t considered that state law required some of the information in the report to be kept secret because it came from a confidential investigation by the state Government Accountability Board.
“I dropped the ball in telling (Schimel) he could release it,” Hue said Tuesday.
The Wisconsin State Journal first reported on the judge reconsidering his decision.
Hue had already stepped away from overseeing the case earlier this month after the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on numerous tweets by Hue in which the judge had weighed in on the case before it had been assigned to him.
A spokesman for Schimel had no immediate reaction to the news.
Schimel filed a report in court this month seeking contempt proceedings against nine government officials for allegedly mishandling millions of pages of records they gathered in a series of investigations that were supposed to be kept secret. The attorney general was looking into the illegal leak of information from the probes to a British newspaper.
Two of those probes were so-called John Doe investigations that are conducted in secret and overseen by a judge.
Schimel referred in his report to a third related investigation as "John Doe III." But that investigation into potential campaigning on taxpayer time by state employees was not a John Doe at all but an investigation conducted by the now-defunct Government Accountability Board, Hue said.
Since no one was charged or fined in that investigation, state law prohibits the release of that information from it.
Hue said he wished Schimel had spelled out those details more clearly in his report, but held himself responsible for releasing the information. In retrospect, Hue said he would have blacked out the names of the people investigated for campaigning on state time since they hadn't been charged.
“Ultimately, it came down to me,” Hue said. “I wish I had seen it.”
Schimel’s report also lists the names of individuals and entities mentioned in more than 200 search warrants that were issued in John Does I and II. Hue said he also should have asked the state Supreme Court if those should be released instead of signing off on his own for making them public.
In general, prosecutors avoid releasing information on a target of a criminal investigation if that person is not ultimately charged.
After Hue stepped down from overseeing the John Doe case, Brown County Circuit Judge Kendall Kelley took over responsibility for the probe. Kelley is the fifth judge to oversee proceedings dealing with the probe of Walker's campaign and its aftermath.
Schimel also wants the state Office of Lawyer Regulation to consider professional sanctions against Shane Falk, who until 2014 was an attorney with the now-disbanded Government Accountability Board. Falk has said he acted appropriately and has reported the issue to legal regulators himself so they could look into the issue.
Falk and the others had been investigating whether GOP Gov. Scott Walker's campaign had illegally worked with conservative groups in recall elections in 2011 and 2012. The state Supreme Court in 2015 found nothing illegal had occurred and shut down this probe, known as John Doe II.
The investigation was conducted in secret under the John Doe law by a special prosecutor, Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm's office and the accountability board. Chisholm headed an earlier investigation known as John Doe I that led to the convictions of six of Walker’s aides and associates during his time as Milwaukee County executive.
In 2016, the Guardian U.S. published 1,300 pages of secret records that had been leaked from the probes about the inner workings of Walker's campaign and groups backing him.
Schimel investigated the the leak was illegal and determined it likely came from the accountability board. But the attorney general did not bring criminal charges since he said he could not prove them beyond a reasonable doubt.