Walkergate: Something Old, Something New

Sunday night, Fox6Now of Milwaukee had some "breaking news" that Fran McLaughlin, who used to be Scott Walker's Communications Director when he was Milwaukee County Executive, had her name appear in documents involved with the illegal politicking trial of Kelly Rindfleisch.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel followed that with a story of their own on their website iterating the same thing.

Of course, for the readers of Cog Dis, this is old news.  On Friday, I wrote about it first:

The next interesting tidbit comes on the bottom of page 13, where the last arrow is pointing:

rellyk (Rindfleisch): and then I got Fran highlighting all the mistakes in the press releases that the campaign does

Fran would be Fran McLaughlin, who was Walker's spokeswoman as county executive. Yet another name to add to the corruption list. What is also interesting, at least for Milwaukeeans, is that McLaughlin currently is the Public Information Officer for Sheriff David Clarke, a pompous ass that has aligned himself with the teahadists and other conservative nut jobs and is more interested in politicking than actually performing the duties of his office. One has to wonder if McLaughlin got waived through the normal screening process and background check before Clarke gave her this political appointment.

The really curious thing about the article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article is that there is not one single mention of McLaughlin or her involvement. Why was her name omitted?

Fox6Now then followed up with an interview with Walker today, in which he trotted out the same old line about not knowing anything and claiming to put a stop to it when he found out. He did so because, you know, he's an Eagle Scout and all, and would never let his people use government property for campaigning.

But we know better than that, don't we?

For once, I would love to see a reporter actually drill Walker about this instead of just nodding their heads and taking what he says as gospel truth. How many times do they have to be lied to before they start doing their jobs and investigate a story?

To his credit, Steve Schultze of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel introduced a new name that had previously flown under my radar (emphasis mine):

Fran McLaughlin, Walker's county spokeswoman, and Jon Myhre, a deputy spokesman, were among a group of seven former county employees whose personnel records were subpoenaed by prosecutors in connection with the investigation, according to court records.

A quick Google search gives us Myhre's LinkedIn profile which shows that after he left the county executive's office the first time, he was involved with various positions in the health care field, including communications, business development and sourcing advisor.

One would think that such a position might have brought Myhre into contact with Kelly Rindfleisch and/or Andrea Boom who both worked for the Wisconsin Association of Health Plans.

Oddly, Myhre's profile is incomplete in that it does not include the two months that he served as "county policy advisor" in the spring of 2010, about the time that Walker promoted Rindfleisch to be his Deputy Chief of Staff (and somehow forgetting to mention this to his Chief of Staff Tom Nardelli).

I don't know if it is because the district attorney's office didn't ask for them or because the reporters didn't look for them, but I do note that there's at least a couple names missing from that list that really should be included.  Ah well, I'm sure the DA's office will get to them soon enough.  They just need to remember that not all the bad guys were always in Walker's executive office per se.