How can you tell when Scott Walker is lying? No, the answer is not the old joke "You can see his lips moving." When he's discussing corruption and illegal activity perpetrated by his closest staff members when he was the Milwaukee County Executive, it's easy to tell when Walker is lying. He starts saying "we" when asked directly about what he knew and when he knew it.
He met briefly with reporters last week a couple days after two more of his former staffers were charged with illegal campaign activities. When he was asked about whether he had any knowledge of illegal activity by other staff members, he answered:
"Our campaign has been cooperating with individuals looking into this. As part of that, we plan to continue to cooperate with them.”
When asked who originally hired Kelly Rindfleisch, one of the staffers charged last week, Walker avoided answering the question but said about her:
"We would have treated that individual the same way that we asked for the resignation of Darlene Wink."
When asked about any others, Walker said:
"If we had known about anybody else, we would have taken action. You know, we have thousands of people who work for the county, and plenty more that work for the state."
It was Darlene Wink who was caught doing campaign-related activities on county time. A newspaper story about her is what triggered the John Doe investigation that many are now referring to as Walkergate. The Milwaukee County District Attorney's office has so far charged 5 people with crimes and briefly arrested another for not cooperating with the secret investigation despite being given immunity. One of the five people charged has already been convicted of exceeding the maximum amount of campaign donations allowable to Walker by an individual. He had his employees donate to Walker and then reimbursed them.
I also was struck by the phrase "that individual..." Walker used to describe Kelly Rindfleisch. Walker has known Rindfleisch for years. She was actually given immunity in a similar scandal that rocked the Wisconsin legislature a decade ago, when Walker was an Assembly representative and Rindfleisch a capitol staffer. His referring to her as "that individual" kind of reminds me of "I did not have sexual relations with that woman...."
But back to the lying...I noticed the "we" thing a while ago, so I looked back at the transcript of the phone call that he had in February, 2011 with a man he thought was billionaire David Koch but who turned out to be blogger Ian Murphy, who posted a recording of the call on the Buffalo Beast web site. During that phone call, Walker often used "we" when describing his ugly strategies for dealing with unions, Democratic Senators, and thousands of protesters:
Walker: So we’re trying about four or five different angles, so each day we crank up a little bit more pressure. The other thing is I’ve got layoff notices ready. We put out the at-risk notices. We’ll announce Thursday, and they’ll go out early next week. And we’ll probably get 5 to 6,000 state workers will get at-risk notices for layoffs. We might ratchet that up a little bit, you know.
"David Koch": Right, right. Well, we’ll back you any way we can. But, uh, what we were thinking about the crowds was, uh, was planting some troublemakers.
Walker: You know, the, well, the only problem with that — because we thought about that.
Walker: Came home from the Super Bowl where the Packers won, and that Monday night I had all of my cabinet over to the residence for dinner. Talked about what we were gonna do, how we were gonna do it. We’d already kinda built plans up, but it was kind of the last hurrah before we dropped the bomb.
So what's with the "we" thing? I think it's the way Walker diffuses guilt in his own mind for his illegal and unethical actions. It's not him, it's those friends he hangs out with. They're just a bad influence.
Walker is consistent about it, too, to the point of absurdity. It's almost comical when he uses "we" to describe what he would have done as the Milwaukee County Executive if he'd only known what was happening in his office. When you count up the arrests, criminal charges, and resignations, it appears that every top level staffer was involved in the illegal activities. So who is this fictitious "we" that would have fired everybody? If one were to believe Walker, he was the only one out of the loop of all the criminal activity happening every day just steps from his office door. Only he could have fired them all.
Walker is pretty smooth most of the time. He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't even blink. He just drones on with the same monotone talking points day after day, pausing occasionally to suck in some air through his mouth. His head never moves. His answers are completely rehearsed, as liars' answers often are, but he has that one giveaway. When he knows what he did was wrong, he psychologically drags all his cronies in with him to help share the blame.
It's not "we", Scott. It's you. A woman in the gallery during your recent State of the State address summed it up well with just one word...