Well, well, well. The Republicans were right. There was a case of voter fraud. It was double voting by a Republican.

Nice job, Prosecutor Biskupic.  Another misconception shattered.  No further comment required:

The Journal Sentinel's Proof & Hearsay reports:

He double voted to benefit ...

By Derrick Nunnally

Thursday, Aug 23 2007, 04:13 PM

Few things in the American political system are viewed as sacrosanct as the concept that a voter's ballot is secret.

Perhaps that's why lawyers, when they had Michael A. Zore under oath in his trial for voting twice in last November's election, he wasn't asked for whom he had cast his acknowledged multiple ballots.

However — and this ought to answer questions posed by several readers — we get a fairly definitive answer in this transcript of Zore's interrogation by a detective, which turned up in courthouse records.

Fresh from their fierce defense of US Attorney Steven Biskupic against claims that politics affected his prosecutions, Wisconsin wingnuts are complaining that their new Republican attorney general isn't putting politics ahead of the law.

J.B. Van Hollen, who took office in January, has come under fire for failing to prosecute -- or at least dirty up --the Democratic governor, Jim Doyle. The wingnuts are also unhappy about opinions he's issued on abortion and affirmative action issues.

Van Hollen was praised by the conservative Madison newspaper, the Wisconsin State Journal, for his even-handedness. In an editorial, it said:

He also has shown he's not the far-right ideologue or partisan opportunist that some had feared.

And that's his problem with the right. Jessica McBride, an Ann Coulter wannabe whose husband lost the GOP primary for AG to Van Hollen, wrote:

Wisconsin State Journal praises Van Hollen for not being a "right-wing ideologue"

With all due respect, the only problem with that analysis is that he PROMISED to be a right-wing ideologue.

I think it's a gubernatorial strategy.

Van Hollen was grilled Wednesday on Charlie Sykes' conservative talk show on WTMJ-AM in Milwaukee. Sykes likes hunting RINOs (Republicans In Name Only), and seems to have Van Hollen in his sights.

- via MAL Contends

An e-mail written by a former Navy officer corroborates the account of a Vietnam-era airman who witnessed the death of a colleague killed in a gruesome C-54 aircraft accident in 1969 at a Naval Air Facility in Naples, Italy.

The crushing death of Airman Gary Holland in the wheel well of the C-54 set in motion a chain of events that 36 years later led the US Veterans Administration (VA) and the US Atty for the Eastern District of Wisconsin in 2006 to indict and convict a veteran, Airman Keith Roberts (1968-71), diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), on charges of wire fraud, arguing that Roberts fabricated his role at the death scene and his relationship with Holland, defrauding the VA.

The explanation for why US Atty Stephen Biskupic's reached out of his district (the Eastern Dist. of Wisconsin) into the city of Madison (a liberal stronghold in the Western Dist. of Wisconsin) in the search for voter fraud is not given in the Capital Times piece that broke Saturday (though the question is suggested):

As part of a push to prosecute voter fraud cases across the country, federal prosecutors in Milwaukee requested the voting rolls for the city of Madison from the November 2004 election, according to documents released to Congressional investigators looking into last year’s firing of eight U.S. Attorneys. 

Why did Biskupic, like he did in the discredited Georgia Thompson prosecution, reach into the Western Dist. when there were not even partisan allegations of voter fraud in Madison like in Milwaukee after 2004?

Today’s Capital Times’ piece by Judith Davidoff and David Callender reveals that Biskupic’s push to investigate alleged voter fraud was not limited to Milwaukee but also targeted the high Democratic-voting areas of the city of Madison and Southeastern Wisconsin. 

Biskupic, after publicly finding no evidence of any widespread pattern of fraud or voter irregularities as part of a bipartisan task force, launched the voter fraud investigations and subsequent prosecutions anyway, precisely in accordance with the national Republican program to suppress Democratic turnout.  

Writes Davidoff and Callender: 

US Attorney Steven Biskupic tried to squeeze Georgia Thompson, the state employee who was falsely convicted, offering her leniency in exchange for testimony against higher-ups in the administration of Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle.

Biskupic has insisted the case was not politically motivated.

Isthmus has details in a copyrighted story today.

Here's my post on DailyKos.

UPDATE: WashPost reports 26 US Attorneys were on the dismissal list at some point. Biskupic was on the very first. List.

The latest member of the Steven Biskupic Fan Club is Journal Sentinel suburban columnist Mike Nichols, who praises Biskupic in a weekend column.

Biskupic, according to Nichols, is the most non-political federal prosecutor ever to hold office. He’s a straight shooter, a principled prosecutor, who’s so apolitical he probably would have been a monk if he hadn’t chosen public service instead.

 Well and good. That may all be true, although it is certainly in some dispute. But even if Nichols is right in his assessment, it does not explain his conclusion. Discussing the Georgia Thompson case, Nichols writes:

Granted, the prosecution of Thompson, the purchasing official in the Doyle Administration, was a bust. Being a political creature like Thompson, it turns out, is not a crime.

But you have to admire a prosecutor who starts from the premise that it might be.

Really? You have to admire Biskupic for prosecuting an innocent woman, sending her to prison and ruining her life?

- Listen to this story now using RealPlayer from Wisconsin Public Radio -
Via MAL Contends
As Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the House Committee on the Judiciary today, veterans mobilized on behalf of jailed Air Force vet Keith Roberts, indicted and convicted by the controversial US Atty Stephen Biskupic.

In several e-mail trees, the veterans urged veterans and supporters to phone members of the Judiciary Committee questioning Gonzales on the recent firings of US Attys, and what US Attys who had kept their jobs may have done to remain in their positions.

Madison, Wisconsin—The opinion by the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit that explained the freeing of the innocent state worker Georgia Thompson is being used by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel to provide political cover for US Atty Biskupic. 

The Journal-Sentinel editorial, “Mistakes aren't crimes” (April 24, 2007), seized a slender reed at the end of the 14-page opinion that was also used by Biskupic in his own audacious public relations move after the written opinion was issued April 20.

Reads Biskupic’s statement on the Court’s opinion: “We are studying the decision to determine its impact on other cases. Meanwhile, given the initial rhetoric surrounding the result, we are heartened that the opinion notes the good faith legal difference inherent in the case.”

by MAL Contends

Madison, Wisconsin—The life of Robert Houghwout Jackson (1892-1954) is many things.

Scholar and jurist, public servant, humanity’s chief advocate at Nuremberg (1945-46), US Supreme Court Justice (1941–1954), and Brown v. Board of Education’s champion (his Brown opinion drafts were more confrontational and scholarly, reflecting the man’s moral outrage and intellect), Jackson’s like is difficult to locate among contemporary jurists.

As the Bush administration has turned the Department of Justice into a political operation of the White House, and liberal district attorneys around the country (including Wisconsin, see Brian Blanchard, for example) engage in frenzied quests to prove their tough-on-crime bone fides in furtherance of political careers, Jackson, as the US Attorney General (1940-41), speaks to us today with urgency.