Walker's deceit and dishonesty speak louder than his promises

"To live outside the law you must be honest," Bob Dylan says.

Scott Walker has turned that around.

He has managed to avoid being charged with breaking the state's Public Records Law while still operating dishonestly, the Journal Sentinel reports.

As background: I have an interest in the case and know some of what transpired firsthand. I am the one who filed a request for some public documents with the Milwaukee County pension office in February 2004, during the last election campaign for County Executive. I was the strategist for Walker's opponent, David Riemer.

I'll get to the details of how Walker's government handled the request. But suffice it to say they did not provide the information I requested and basically put one over on me, the Riemer campaign, and Milwaukee County voters in the process.

The State Dept. of Justice, in a letter to Walker and Riemer, doesn't reach a conclusion over whether Walker broke the law or not. It says that's arguable, but it says this is such a unique case there is no point in taking the matter to court to try to establish a precedent.

DOJ has some harsh words for Walker and his minions, however:

"In sum, this episode evinces a case of how government officials ought not to do business...

"Whether they violated the public records law is a question largely mooted by the later production of the waivers and the nearly inconceivable notion that a repeat of this inglorious set of circumstances might be forestalled by a judicial pronouncement on the matter.

"Nobody honored to serve in public office ought to manipulate public records in this fashion -- that is the opinion of this office."

What DOJ concluded is that it was uncertain whether a court would find that Walker violated the law, even though the investigation found "a troubling course of conduct by county employees." It also concluded that the likelihood of a similar case ever arising again was "nearly inconceivable," so a court decision wouldn't set any valuable precedent.

Here's what happened:

Scott Walker was elected county executive in 2002 after the previous exec, Tom Ament, was caught up in a pension scandal and resigned rather than face a recall. Walker promised to clean up the mess. One of his promises was that he would require every political appointee who worked for him to sign waivers of their rights to the huge pension payouts that were at the heart of the scandal.

When he ran for a full term last year, he ran as someone who had kept all of his promises.

But county employees told the Riemer campaign that wasn't true, and that Walker had allowed many of his appointees to political jobs to continue to work without signing any waivers.

So we asked for the records.

I wrote the letter and asked for copies of all pension waivers that had been signed by county employees since Walker took office.

What I got instead was a list of all county employees who had signed waivers.

It sounds like the same thing, right? It would have been equivalent to what I requested except for the dishonesty and coverup ordered by Scott Walker himself after my request was received.

The DOJ letter to Walker and Riemer, dated Nov. 10 and signed by Assistant Atty. Gen. Monica Burkert Brist, explains what happened:

"The problem lies in the actions of county officials during the ten day period between their receipt of the written request [from me] and the date of their response. After receiving the public records request, the County Human Resources Office notified County Executive Walker or a member of his personal staff. At some point shortly thereafter, it was discovered that numerous county employees had not executed their pension waiver forms and Mr. [Steve] Mokrohisky was personally assigned by County Executive Walker to "clean up" this matter. Mr. Mokrohisky and Mr. Walker readily admitted that this was a matter of some embarrassment to the administration.

"In an effort to get all waivers signed in hurry, employees who had not signed waiver forms were personally visited to obtain signatures and the forms were then filed. Once all the missing waivers were obtained, Mr. [Matthew] Janes {who heads the pension office]issued an updated version of an existing list maintained by the Human Resources staff and provided it to Mr. [Charles] McDowell [director of Human Services] to give to Mr. Christofferson.

"The list did not indicate when [DOJ's emphasis] people had signed the waivers, just the fact that waivers had been filed. By not providing the copies of the waivers themselves, those responding to the request avoided disclosing the fact that numerous employees had not signed them until after the records request came in from the Riemer campaign."

Whether I agreed to the list instead of the waivers themselves is in dispute. Walker's people say I did; I don't believe I did. I distinctly remember being surprised at how small the package of documents was when it arrived in the mail, because I had been expecting copies of waivers, not a list. But that's really neither here nor there.

The indisputable point is that Walker himself ordered his staff to engage in coverup and deception to keep the public -- the voters, since this was in the midst of an election campaign -- from learning the truth. [Dave Umhoefer, a Journal Sentinel reporter, uncovered the truth after the election.]

The disonesty was deliberate. It was calculated. It was wrong. And it was ordered by the guy at the top of the chain of command, Walker himself.

Walker's running for governor now, promising to clean up state government.

That promise is as empty and meaningless as his promise to clean up the pension mess and collect waivers from his appointees. (Even after all of the deception, more than 60 Walker appointees still hadn't signed the waivers, and some received hundreds of thousands of dollars in lump sum pension payouts as a result.)

It's bad enough that Walker breaks his promises. But the deceit, deception and coverup are even worse. They tell you more about Scott Walker than any glib promise. He's a phony, through and through.

He'll claim, I'm sure, that this DOJ finding is just partisan politics, since the AG is a Democrat and he's a Republican. He is fortunate that he won't be telling his story in court.