Caleb Brown interviews Eric O’Keefe on the abusive Wisconsin John Doe prosecution of alleged unlawful campaign coordination, much covered in this space. O’Keefe says the growing scope of campaign regulation allows wider scope for the law to be used to harass and persecute outsiders and minority viewpoints, and also speculates as to why the prosecution has not been subject to more intense scrutiny in the press: “The prosecutors have cultivated relationships over a long period of time with the newspapers. Prosecutors get a lot of good stories first, like who they’re going to indict, who got arrested…so the newspapers tend to pander to prosecutors and together they have extremely powerful weapons.” Emails from the Wisconsin John Doe targets’ private accounts, for example, scooped up by prosecutors’ secret subpoenas, later surfaced in stories in the newspapers putting the targets in a bad light.

Filed under: campaign regulation, media bias, prosecutorial abuse, Wisconsin