After the state’s high court ordered files of the politically charged Wisconsin John Doe II investigation destroyed, something else happened instead: “The Guardian published a leaked trove of documents from the John Doe II proceedings, including court filings, draft filings, and selected evidence prepared and kept by only some members of the prosecution team.” A just-unsealed report from the Wisconsin Department of Justice suggests a range of possible illegalities and rights violations, as well as political motivations, in the conduct of the investigators [“Warren Henry,” The Federalist]:
[Th]hree hard drives in particular contained nearly 500,000 unique emails (from Yahoo and Gmail accounts, for example) and other documents (email attachments, for example) totaling millions of pages. The hard drives included transcripts of Google Chat logs between several individuals, most of which were purely personal (and sometimes very private) conversations. GAB [a state agency involved in the investigations] placed a large portion of these emails into several folders entitled, ‘Opposition Research’ or ‘Senate Opposition Research.’
For example,
investigators obtained, categorized, and maintained over 150 personal emails between [state] Senator Leah Vukmir and her daughter, including emails containing private medical information and other highly personal information. [WIDoJ] was unable to determine why investigators ever obtained, let alone saved and labeled, over 150 very private and very personal emails between a Senator and her child, or why investigators placed those emails in a folder named ‘Opposition Research.’
Earlier here.