Walkergate: Rindfleisch's Desperation Defense

Even though Kelly Rindfleisch had pleaded guilty to doing campaign work while on work time for Milwaukee County, she appealed her conviction.  After months of delay tactics in which she failed to stall the release of the emails and documents used to convict her, she finally had her day in appellate court.

In a nutshell, Rindfleisch argued - through her mouthpiece Frankly Gimbel, who she paid with funds raised by Scott Walker and company - that her guilty plea should be overturned because the search warrant was too broad and violated her Fourth Amendment Rights and her privacy.  She also argued that the prosecutors should have used a third party to filter through the emails that they had taken.

The state, represented by Assistant Attorney General Christopher Wren, pointed out that the investigators sought a very specific, albeit large, group of emails and not any other information that the email companies might have gathered from Rindfleisch.

Paid propagandist M.D. Kittle, who quickly rattled off a spin defense, shows how nervous the right wing is about this:

When the hour-long oral arguments concluded, however, Gimbel said he was “insecure” that he and the appeals court were focusing on the same issues.

That means Gimbel was afraid that the judges were going to look at all the facts and not just his Hail Mary defense tactics.

Kittle further belies their nervousness by starting to smear the judges.

There are two major points that both the mainstream media's report and Kittle's panicky prose both miss.

One, Rindfleisch's appeal should be denied because their argument is based on the faulty premise that Rindfleisch was targeted because of political reasons.

The fact is that the John Doe investigation known as Walkergate started as an investigation in whether money was stolen from a veterans' fund.  That investigation led to emails that showed a secondary crime - illegal politicking - had been committed.

It was the evidence from Tim Russell's emails that led to this new investigative trail that led to the arrest, charging and conviction of Rindfleisch.  She only became a target after investigators found the crime and learned that she was one of the people committing said crime.

The second point is one that will stand true regardless of what the appellate court decides.

There is not one person - not even Rindfleisch or her attorney or anyone else - who is saying that she is innocent and did not commit the crime that she was convicted for.  Her defense is that the prosecutors shouldn't be allowed to use the evidence that they legally found and used against her, but not that she didn't commit the crime.

Whether Rindfleisch is able to pull off a Scott Jensen maneuver of buying her way off the hook through a technicality has yet to be seen.

But either way, we know that Walker and his crew were running a caucus style campaign through the county executive's office, just as they are doing now from the governor's office.