Remember that she is going to jail for almost exactly what someone involved in Wisconsin’s unconstitutional John Doe persecution did. Will here be prosecutions in Wisconsin?

Former Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane has been sentenced to 10 to 23 months in prison for perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of office charges.

Kane, the first Democrat to be elected to Pennsylvania’s top law enforcement position, resigned in August after being convicted on all nine counts.

Kane had asked to be sentenced to house arrest, but prosecutors argued her misuse of office was worthy of jail time.

The swift downfall of the once-rising star, seen as a potential candidate for governor or a U.S. Senate seat, began after she leaked secret grand jury material in hopes of embarrassing a political rival. Kane later lied about her role in the leak while under oath.

Kane was convicted of leaking grand jury information meant to undermine a former top prosecutor who had begun a sting investigation into six Philadelphia-area officials, including five state legislators. Kane did not prosecute the six officials, and she blamed a leak to the Philadelphia Inquirer on the former prosecutor.

She then handed older grand jury information to another paper, the Philadelphia Daily News, in a bid to undermine that former prosecutor.

These people have no shame and no morals. This is what a rogue prosecutor looks like.

It’s supposed to be a secret investigation. But it never really was.

Leaking like a sieve since Day One, Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm’s politically-fueled John Doe investigation into Wisconsin conservatives saw its biggest leak yet on Wednesday. With weeks left on its legal clock before the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether to take the case, 1,500 pages of documents related to the case were leaked to the U.K. Guardian.

How did that happen? After all, these documents were supposed to be sealed. At one point, they were ordered to be destroyed by the late federal judge Rudolph Randa in May 2014.

Wow. Just. Wow. As part of the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling killing the John Doe investigation, the court ordered the prosecutors to tell everyone they had investigated what they had taken as part of the investigation.

As it turns out, virtually every prominent conservative activist in the state was being secretly investigated. Brian Fraley reacts to the news here:

Well, what do you know. The soon-to-be-history Government Accountability Board and their hackneyed John Doe investigation of Wisconsin conservatives had me in their sights all along.

Yesterday, my former employer let me know that disgraced former Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz sent me a letter informing me that four years of my emails, online calendar, and all documents stored in the Google Drive cloud had been seized during the John Doe witch hunt.

Included in these emails are pdfs of my tax returns.

All my online passwords.

All my personal health records and those of my oldest daughter.

Credit card and banking statements.

In short, they sought and (thanks to a Judge who didn’t scrutinize the request) they received everything emailed by or to me for nearly four years. All over a suspected violation of campaign finance law, which has subsequently been determined by the court to be based on a flawed interpretation of state law.

There are others. Consider the utter lawlessness and intrusiveness of this. It’s like something out of North Korea. Citizens who had done nothing wrong had years worth of personal data collected and sifted through by government officials without ever even notifying the victims that they were being investigated. And, to keep it in perspective, we aren’t talking about an investigation of the Mafia here. We’re talking about people possibly coordinating political activities – something that was never a crime.

The legislature chose to reform instead of scrap the John Doe laws in Wisconsin. They should revisit that decision. Prosecutors should not have so much power to operate in secrecy.

Indeed, he should.

This has been a long, unfortunate chapter in Wisconsin’s history. The courts have unequivocally rejected the John Doe investigation, both in the manner in which it was carried out, as well as the legal arguments brought by the prosecutors. The Wisconsin Supreme Court has now ordered that the property seized be returned. For everyone involved, the special prosecutor should end the case, and the property seized from the individuals in this case should be returned immediately.

Will the Supreme Courts ruling be enforced?

Given that the Supreme Court issued its order months ago for the prosecutors to immediately return or destroy all of the materials they confiscated in their illegal crusade, why do they still even have them?

Milwaukee County prosecutors want a federal court to order them to preserve evidence from a John Doe probe that the state Supreme Court has said must be destroyed.

Milwaukee County DA John Chisholm and two of his top deputies argued in yesterday’s filing the materials the state Supreme Court wants returned to witnesses or destroyed may be essential to their defense in a lawsuit filed against them by former Walker aide Cynthia Archer.

Archer’s lawsuit claims she was targeted in John Doe I for her work helping Gov. Scott Walker advance Act 10.

The prosecutors said the Supreme Court order, which shut down John Doe II, does not make specific reference from the first secret probe, which resulted in the convictions of six aides or associates of then-Milwaukee County Exec Walker. But the evidence compiled in John Doe II, which focused on coordination between Walker and conservative groups in the recall elections, includes some evidence from the first probe, according to the filing.

The order from the state Supreme Court requires prosecutors to “return all property seized in the investigation from any individual or organization, and permanently destroy all the copies of information and other materials obtained through the investigation.”

The more we hear about how the John Doe investigation went, the more we realize just how abusive and out of control the whole thing was.

Prominent Republican political strategist R.J. Johnson told a Wall Street Journal editorial writer he was in an airplane when word reached him that his 16-year-old son had awakened in their home to find six law enforcement officers executing a search warrant.

“He was told he couldn’t move, that he couldn’t call a lawyer, that he couldn’t call his parents,” Johnson told the newspaper. “He was a minor and he was isolated by law enforcement.”

[…]

At the end of the session, Johnson said, Milwaukee Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf asked him: “‘Is there any reason at the end of the campaign you deleted all of your emails?’ So I knew then I had been tracked all the way through, that they had been reading my emails.” But Johnson said he was surprised when he learned his house was searched as part of the second investigation.

The leader of the state’s business lobby said in the article that prosecutors obtained its records with a subpoena, not a search warrant. Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce hired consultants to copy large quantities of digital information for prosecutors, president and CEO Kurt Bauer said.

“I think part of the goal was to chill our fundraising and keep us off the airwaves,” Bauer said. “So the money and time we had to spend defending ourselves was money and time that we couldn’t spend toward issue advocacy.”

This is a very interesting decision. One can see how difficult it would have been to hold the oral arguments and still preserve the secrecy provisions of the affair.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday canceled next month’s oral arguments on three cases related to the secret investigation into Gov. Scott Walker’s 2012 recall campaign and said it will decide the issues based only on written filings.

The court had scheduled arguments for April 17 and April 20. But in its order late Friday afternoon the court said, “it is neither legally nor practically possible to hold oral argument.”

The three cases relate to a John Doe investigation into whether conservative groups illegally coordinated with Walker’s recall campaign in 2012.

Unnamed parties have filed two lawsuits challenging the probe’s validity. Prosecutors have filed another action seeking to reinstate quashed subpoenas that halted the investigation more than a year ago.

The arguments before the Supreme Court, which are routinely open to the public, were expected to be awkward, given that much information remains shielded from public view, including names of petitioners.

The court had asked attorneys for everyone involved to come up with a plan for proceeding. They had suggested that public affairs network WisconsinEye could broadcast the arguments on a delay so secret information could be deleted out. But WisconsinEye wouldn’t agree to that.

Finally.

MADISON, Wis. — The Wisconsin Supreme Court has agreed to hear three cases stemming from a John Doe investigation of fundraising and spending by Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign and conservative groups backing him.

The court on Tuesday accepted a legal challenge from two targets of the probe; a separate lawsuit from those two targets and another; and an action by special prosecutor Francis Schmitz to try to reinstate subpoenas that were quashed by the judge overseeing the investigation.

Stuff just got real.

Long-time political activist Eric O’Keefe, a director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, on Monday sent a certified letter to Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm demanding that Chisholm ask the Milwaukee County Circuit Court to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the conduct of the DA and his office.

Chisholm was not in his office Monday morning, according to an assistant. He could not be reached for comment.

O’Keefe notes that Wisconsin law prohibits a district attorney from using the powers and privileges of his office for the financial benefit of himself, his immediate family members, or an organization with which his immediate family members are associated.

A distric attorney also is prohibited from using those powers and privileges to obtain an unlawful advantage for third parties, such as political candidates and recall committees; to obtain through official functions for those illegitimate purposes; and from allowing his office to become de facto campaign grounds.

“Recently, credible factual reports suggest that you may have done all these things,” O’Keefe states in the letter.