appeals in chicago stayed judge randall s preliminary injunction, saying he had s pr injunction, saying he had overstepped his authority. the appeals court ruling also said randa cannot order prosecutors to destroy evidence they have collected in the five-county probe. of course, judge randa s frequenting of conservative conferences is one of the many ways right wing money attempts to influence senators. and there s a case to be made, this kind of ideological lobbying has been the koch brothers and others greatest success story today. joining me now is nick confessory, who is on the money and politics beat a way others are. this is not like, the reason you ruled for judge walker is because you got some free breakfast in a hotel room. the point is that we focus so much now on, americans for prosperity and the koch brothers in the post citizens united,
markets and stuff like that. they ve been really successful in moving the center of legal opinion. well, look, you can t lobby a judge. right. but you can wine and dine them. you can take them to a seminar. you can educate them, teach them new ideas about anti-trust and regulation, and that s what they do. if you look at his decision, by the way, in that wisconsin case, what s fascinating about it is not the substance, because you can argue that the prosecutions were pushing the envelope a little bit on their theory of the coordination in that case with scott walker. what was striking about it was the tone, where he celebrates and says, if they can find a way to evade these campaign laws, great. fantastic. so this investigation, basically, is, look at the recall election, as far as we know, from previous reports, in which they are, you know, prosecutors think it may be the case they violated wisconsin campaign finance law by essentially coordinating illegally. yes. that s w
reversed by the seventh circuit. he recently issued a pretty remarkable and scathing opinion that ordered a preliminary injunction of the wisconsin investigation of the governor s friends of scott walker campaign and conservative groups. the investigation was into the possibility of illegal coordination between the campaign and those groups. and judge randall s injunction was made on the grounds that the investigation itself violated the first amendment rights of all those organizations and the campaign in wisconsin club for growth. amazingly, judge randall also ordered prosecutors to, and i m quoting, return all property seized in the investigation from any individual organization and permanently destroy all copies of information, other materials obtained through investigation. that, that is not something you hear from a federal judge every day. you are hereby ordered to destroy evidence. indeed, three-judge panel of the seventh circuit u.s. court of
into. and he says, the plaintiffs have found a way to circumvent campaign finance laws. stop for a second. normally, any legal authority using the word circumvent about law is saying you re doing the wrong thing. in fact, circumvention appears over and over again in the penal code, the criminal code, as something you should not do. right, exactly, you don t say, hey, mom and dad, i m going to go out and circumvent some laws today. then he goes on to say, that circumvention should not and cannot be condemned or restricted. instead, it should be recognized as promoting political speech and activity that is engrained in our culture. so you have this wonderful full circleness. you have money pouring into the political and ideological system that has produced, helped to aid and facilitate a supreme court and legal structure, that says money is speech. right. and then you have this judge here who s ruling that it is so. we are in the middle of a four-decade or more battle against
never going to be a good day when there s news like this about an investigation into your campaign finance. a judge who ended walker probe attended finance by junkets financed by koch, bradley, and other conservative foundations. a analyst by the center for media and democracy shows the that judge rudolph randa attended seminars put on by george mason university in 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012, according to publicly available financial disclosure forms. the george mason university seminars are bankrolled by a long list of foundations like the charles g. koch foundation, the linde and harry bradley foundation, and the searle freedom trust, in addition to u.s. corporations like ge, and dow capital. that judge who attended those meetings is a reliable conservative of the branch, gained some notoriety for striking down a law, a ruling