On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published profiles of Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, who we noted had elevated his career in Wisconsin politics by dragging his feet and refusing to prosecute cases against Republican Governor Scott Walker and Republican state legislator Joel Kleefisch when both were caught in ethical and potentially criminal endeavors in carrying out their offices. Schimel has gone on record to say he opposes minimum wage increases (during the greatest era of income inequality in our nation’s modern history), and more importantly, he stated his desire to use his office to fight tooth and nail against honoring the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Obergefell v. Hodges case, and even agreed his opposition to the law would be similar to those who opposed interracial marriage becoming legal 60 years ago. This of course made local reporters ask the question of if Schimel was a racist, and lo and behold after some digging, they found training videos from the State Department of Justice in 2009 and 2013 where Schimel made racist and sexist comments while instructing trainees, including putting on false accents to appear as racial caricatures. Of course, these details came up just prior to the 2014 election, and Schimel slid by and won office with 52% of the vote. Schimel’s history of being terrible at his job and not pressing charges continued through 2015, apparently, as he decided against prosecuting two Wisconsin police officers who gunned down a hostage during a siege at a motorcycle shop, with their body camera footage contradicting their version of events. He’s also taken measures to remove environmental oversight from Wisconsin’s water supply, and trust in big business interests to keep it safe.
In 2017 alone, Schimel made headlines in Wisconsin for several controversies, including settling a case against a company caught as serial polluters without imposing a fine against them, claiming the company was sufficiently punished by making them invest in themselves to stop polluting in the first place and then dropping a fraud case against the wealthy Eliason brothers, where they faced 10 felony charges, instead, leaving the case to be handled in civil court and in lawsuits only. This, after a YEAR of trying to put a gag order on the case so no details about it leaked to the public. But effectively, Schimel just thought they were too rich to go to jail, so he didn’t bother pressing charges.
Which, seems par for the course. Then, the public discovered that he spent $10,000 of taxpayer money to create gold collector coins for himself, his staff, and Wisconsin Law Enforcement that say, “Kicking Ass Every Day”, by effectively saying his department was great, deserved them, and that they worked far harder than other state workers, like at the Wisconsin DMV. Schimel blatantly lied in a TV interview, Schimel claiming that Wisconsin does not have a back log of untested rape kits that have yet to be investigated when in reality… There were SIX THOUSAND OF THEM.
And, in late April of 2017 a day after Brad Schimel claimed he would not be opening an investigation into potential voter fraud, he is threatened with being investigated himself by Breitbart “reporter” James O’Keefe. And by “reporter”, we mean exposed lying fraud and convicted felon. But anyway… O’Keefe wants to prove a negative, and that voter fraud exists. His “evidence” is an out-of-context quote from one Democrat, and several other videos that are obviously spliced to create quotes out of context. And guess what? Once O’Keefe threatened to harass Schimel, he caved, and opened an investigation based on lies, at taxpayer expense. (Big surprise… they have found no evidence of voter fraud.) In April of 2018, he got a little too honest and defended Wisconsin’s anti-democratic Voter ID law by proudly stating how it “helped Trump get elected”. (Thousands of voters were blocked from voting at the polls, particularly in Democratic-leaning districts.) Yeah, no more pretenses about mythical “voter fraud”, he outright admitted it helped swing a presidential election to Republicans, therefore, mission accomplished.
A month later, in May of 2018, reports surfaced about how Schimel took time out of his busy schedule ten months prior in July of 2017 to attend an anti-gay conference in California hosted by a “Christian group”, the Alliance for Defending Freedom that’s actually more really of a “hate group”, by the definition of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Even worse for Schimel, there are e-mails that show he would have liked for no one to have noticed his little fun-times-hating-the-gays vacation stop, and his only defense for the trip was that it wasn’t on taxpayer expense. Of course, that’s because the ADF group itself paid for Schimel’s travel and hotel, which is a gift you have to report in your campaign finance reports, and all that. On the ADF’s end… they apparently advised attendees on how to keep their attendance secret from the public, and how to avoid public records laws. “NOTHING SHADY GOING ON HERE, NO SIR.”
Brad Schimel lost in the 2018 elections to Josh Kaul. Minutes before the race was called, he and a band played a cover of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”, and we’re glad that on a political level, he didn’t. We won’t be missing Schimel, and wish him the best of luck f***ing off, never to return to politics.