Orville Seymer, a longtime supporter of Scott Walker, is today out with a guest column in the Wisconsin State Journal calling on Scott Walker to answer questions about his role in the John Doe criminal corruption probe.
Along with proof of illegal campaign coordination and a series of embarrassing emails that show top Walker staff trading racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic messages, the release of more than 27,000 pages of John Doe documents late last month revealed that Scott Walker himself sent and received email messages on a secret network designed to circumvent open records laws.
Seymer, whose Milwaukee-based group Citizens for Responsible Government led the 2002 recall that brought Walker to power, twice tried unsuccessfully to recall Gov. Jim Doyle, and organized an effort in 2012 to undermine the prosecutorial and judicial independence of the first John Doe investigation, surprisingly found his name among the documents.
In his column, Seymer notes that then-deputy chief of staff Kelly Rindfleisch, using the secret email network, sought the counsel of Walker campaign manager Keith Gilkes in replying to an open records request he had filed. Gilkes replies to give Seymer “something that fulfills the request without giving him anything.”
Seymer opines that:
“Gov. Walker’s response to the release of these emails is to call them “old news.” That is not selling with me or many other members of the public. It shouldn’t.
“Walker, like him or not, has always been forthcoming in answering questions from the media. I am asking him to answer the many questions raised by some of the more alarming emails in this mountain of electronic documents. He owes that much to the people who elected him.”
Read the column in its entirety here.
