» Schimel ripped:
Conservative activist James O’Keefe accuses Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel of skimping on an investigation into potential voter fraud and hinting he may turn his undercover cameras on the state’s top cop.
MADISON - Conservative activist James O’Keefe ripped into Wisconsin’s Republican attorney general on Thursday, contending he had skimped on an investigation into potential voter fraud and hinting he may turn his undercover cameras on the state’s top cop.
O’Keefe said Attorney General Brad Schimel’s office had closed out the investigation without seeing additional footage that his group, Project Veritas Action, had offered to provide investigators. A Schimel aide never responded to the offer, O’Keefe said in a statement.
O’Keefe made his name in 2009 with videos that brought down the community organizing group ACORN.
O’Keefe has performed most of his sting operations on liberals, but at times has gone after conservatives, including former Wisconsin Senate President Mike Ellis (R-Neenah). In a 4-minute video released Thursday, O’Keefe suggested Schimel could be one of his next targets.
“If the state of Wisconsin is not going to do their job, then, then, we should — you should be investigated,” O’Keefe said into the camera. “We should investigate you and you should lose your job.”
Schimel spokesman Johnny Koremenos did not respond to requests for comment.
O’Keefe’s statements on Thursday were a response to how Schimel reacted to a series of videos O’Keefe released leading up to last year’s presidential election that O’Keefe claims reveal a voter fraud scheme and other crimes. At the time, Schimel’s office released a statement saying the video showed “apparent violations of the law.”
But the head of Schimel’s criminal litigation division, Roy Korte, closed down an investigation into the matter in January, concluding O’Keefe’s videos showed only vague and hypothetical talk. Korte’s memo did not become public until this week, when it was released to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in response to an open records request it filed months ago.
Korte’s memo said investigators received additional videos that had not been publicly released from O’Keefe’s group but that they did not provide any evidence of voter fraud or other crimes. But in his written statement, O’Keefe said the state had not accepted all of the available additional footage.
A Veritas attorney offered to give Schimel’s senior counsel at the time, Paul Connell, additional footage if he would agree to allow Veritas to blur out the face of someone with Veritas, O’Keefe wrote. Connell is now Schimel’s top deputy.
“No one from your department responded to that offer, a clear indication that there was not a serious interest in conducting a thorough investigation,” O’Keefe wrote.
“Our general opinion of the discussion our attorney had with Mr. Connell is that Mr. Connell was generally uninterested. Mr. Korte’s memo reinforces that opinion.”
No one from the Department of Justice interviewed the undercover Veritas workers, O’Keefe said. Schimel’s spokesman has not said if other interviews were conducted as part of the investigation.
In his memo, Korte wrote that some of the videos appeared to be shot in a Wisconsin bar, but that it was unclear where others were filmed.
O’Keefe said key footage was recorded at the Milwaukee bar Garfield’s 502 and criticized Korte for saying some locations were unknown.
“Any two-bit investigator worth their salt looking at a bunch of videos inside an establishment in Milwaukee would deduce that it’s in Milwaukee,” O’Keefe said in the video he released Thursday. “C’mon, attorney general, you’re showing your cards here. You didn’t watch the tapes and you don’t care to investigate. This is about politics.”
Schimel is also taking heat from Democrats over how he handled the investigation because his office suggested before the election that laws were broken but then quietly reached the opposite conclusion after voters went to the polls.
O’Keefe produced videos of ACORN in 2009 that led to the dismantling of the group. They also resulted in O’Keefe agreeing to pay a $100,000 legal settlement to a former ACORN employee.
In 2010, O’Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for unlawfully entering federal property when he and people disguised as telephone workers entered the office of then-U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.