Even as Scott Walker tries to position himself for a run at the presidency, the long arm of the law may be reaching out for him.
According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the last player in the Walkergate case is his right-hand man, Tim Russell, who just reached a plea deal with prosecutors over his alleged embezzlement of funds from a veterans group.
Russell, as you might recall, is also the person who was alleged to have set up the secret email system inside the capitol so that others could conduct political business on others' time. On November 29, 2012, we are likely to discover more information about what happened, when it happened, what Scott Walker knew, and when he knew it.
But as Capper at Cognitive Dissidence is wont to say, there's always more.
Stemming from these revelations (which were really revelations to only the people that haven't been following along here), Walker was feeling enough heat that he had a press conference to discuss this and try to weasel his way out of it.What a rip snorter that turned out to be!
Walker gave us his best impression of Nixon's "I'm not a crook" line when he again denied being John Doe:
Gov. Scott Walker said Monday that coordination between his gubernatorial campaign and his Milwaukee County executive's office in 2010 was fundamentally different than the caucus scandal that shook the state Capitol a decade ago.
And he said he remains "absolutely" confident that he is not the subject of a criminal investigation involving former aides in the Milwaukee office.
For someone who is supposedly "'absolutely' confident" that he isn't John Doe, he's sure betting against himself. Walker has already funneled a third of a million dollars into his legal cooperation fund - and that's just the money we know of. It's probably a lot more now, especially after today.
And still, there's always more. As Capper notes, prosecutors were looking for Kelly Reindfleisch, who struck a deal last week, to give them information about someone in authority. She gave them very little usable information.
So the question in front of us, which might be answered in court on Thursday, is whether they were able to obtain any "usable information" about Governor Walker in exchange for a deal with Russell, who is facing far more serious charges than Reindfleisch.
Stay tuned. There's always more.