Stuart Taylor, Jr.

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Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Basic facts
Role:	Journalist
Education:	•Princeton University •Harvard Law School
Website:	Official website

Stuart Taylor, Jr. is a journalist who has covered the U.S. Supreme Court and other legal matters for a variety of publications.

Taylor's articles have appeared in National Journal, The New York Times and Newsweek.

He is the co-author of two books—Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It (2012) and Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Fraud (2007).

Taylor's article in Legal Newsline, which accused Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm of having personal motivations for his investigation, played a role in the 2010 John Doe investigations related to Scott Walker.

Career

Stuart Taylor graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor's in history in 1970 and from Harvard Law School in 1977. After working in a law firm from 1978 to 1980, Taylor began writing for The New York Times, where he covered legal affairs and the Supreme Court until 1988. He later published work in a number of outlets, including The Washington Post, National Journal and The Atlantic.

Taylor was a featured commentator on the John Doe investigations related to Scott Walker. Writing two articles commissioned by the American Media Institute, Taylor wrote that Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm (D) maintained a partisan culture in the office. Taylor also said that Chisholm investigated Gov. Scott Walker (R) because of his wife's political views.

Taylor's later writings focused on sexual assault on college campuses. He addressed allegations against former college football player Jameis Winston as well as the allegations of fraternity-sponsored sexual assault at the University of Virginia. Taylor is also the co-author of a book—Until Proven Innocent—about sexual assault allegations against the Duke University men's lacrosse team.

Presidential election, 2016

In an article for Politico Magazine, Taylor criticized then-presumptive Republican nominee for president Donald Trump's personal remarks about U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was the judge overseeing the case involving Trump University. Trump said that a judge of Mexican or Muslim descent would be biased against him because of Trump's immigration policies. In his article, Taylor criticized Trump's attack on Curiel, saying:

“

This is racism and ethnic and religious bias. It is a deplorable elevation of Trump’s raw financial and political self-interest above the law and the national interest. But mostly what we should deplore—and fear—is this: Such a brazen presidential attack on the rule of law, by a man of such a belligerent temperament and crude sensibility, could portend defiance of court orders by a President Trump. And that in turn would be a long step toward authoritarian rule. ... Americans who value the independence of the judiciary should wake up to this threat. Republicans who have held their noses and endorsed Trump should see this as the last straw and dump him.

”

John Doe investigations

See also: John Doe investigations related to Scott Walker

Background

Two John Doe investigations were launched by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm (D) into the activities of staff and associates of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R).

The first investigation, John Doe I, was launched after Walker aide Darlene Wink noticed funds were missing from the money raised by Operation Freedom, a charitable event for veterans that Walker hosted annually. Walker's office turned the case over to the Milwaukee County DA's office to investigate the missing funds.

Over a year passed before the DA's office began investigating the case. By this time, Walker had announced his candidacy for Governor of Wisconsin. On May 5, 2010, Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf asked for the authority to launch a John Doe investigation into the missing funds. He asked for the John Doe on the premise of determining where the funds had originated (i.e., sponsors and donors of the Operation Freedom Event). His request was granted by Judge Neal Nettesheim, who had been appointed the John Doe I judge.

During Walker's 2010 gubernatorial campaign, the John Doe investigation was expanded multiple times to include a Walker donor and members of Walker's county executive staff. The investigation lasted three years and resulted in the convictions of six people, four of whom weren’t related to the missing funds on which the investigation was predicated. The charges were announced in January 2012, in the midst of an effort to recall Gov. Walker due to his support for Act 10.

On June 5, 2012, the recall election attempting to remove Walker from office was held. Walker won re-election by a wider margin than he had when he was first elected in 2010. In August 2012, the first John Doe investigation was rolled into a second investigation, John Doe II. This investigation sought to explore the allegation that Governor Walker’s campaign had illegally coordinated with conservative social welfare groups that had engaged in issue advocacy during the recall elections.

The second John Doe investigation spanned multiple counties but was consolidated into one investigation, overseen by an appointed judge and one special prosecutor, Francis Schmitz. During the early morning hours of October 3, 2013, investigators served search warrants on several homes and subpoenaed records from 29 conservative organizations. Several weeks later, on October 25, 2013, three targets of the subpoenas filed a motion to have the subpoenas quashed. The judge overseeing the investigation, Judge Gregory Peterson, granted that motion in January 2014, saying that the prosecutor's theory of criminal activity was not, in fact, criminal under Wisconsin statutes. Although Schmitz filed an appeal to a higher court, the investigation was effectively stalled.

A series of lawsuits were filed, one against the John Doe prosecutors for a violation of free speech and several others against the agency that oversees campaign finance law, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB), for trying to enforce unconstitutional regulations of issue advocacy groups, the regulations on which the prosecutor's theory was based.

The question of the legality of the investigation eventually went before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. On July 16, 2015, the court ruled in a 4-2 decision to officially halt the John Doe II investigation. The court combined three cases into one, thereby simultaneously ruling on all three. In its ruling, the Supreme Court criticized Schmitz's handling of the case and said the actions of Chisholm and Schmitz were violations of the targets' First Amendment rights to political speech.

The court, in interpreting Wisconsin's campaign finance law, ruled "that the definition of 'political purposes' [...] is unconstitutionally overbroad and vague under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Article 1, Section 3 of the Wisconsin Constitution because its language 'is so sweeping that its sanctions may be applied to constitutionally protected conduct which the state is not permitted to regulate.'"

The court noted that since issue advocacy was beyond the reach of Ch. 11, Schmitz's theory of illegal coordination between Walker's campaign and social welfare groups was invalid. The court further declared "the special prosecutor's legal theory is unsupported in either reason or law," thereby declaring an official end to the John Doe II investigation.

Regarding the other two cases addressed in the ruling, the court denied Schmitz's supervisory writ and affirmed Peterson's original motion to quash the subpoenas. It also ruled that the John Doe II judges, Peterson and Barbara Kluka, had not "violated a plain legal duty" by allowing the appointment of one judge and one special prosecutor to preside over a multi-county John Doe, though the court did say "the circumstances surrounding the formation of the John Doe investigation raise serious concerns."

In its ruling, the court ordered that "everything gathered as potential evidence—including thousands of pages of emails and other documents—be returned and all copies be destroyed."

Taylor's involvement

In September 2014, Taylor published an article in Legal Newsline detailing what his source described as Chisholm's potential motive for pursuing the John Doe investigations. In the article, Taylor wrote:

“	Now a longtime Chisholm subordinate reveals for the first time in this article that the district attorney may have had personal motivations for his investigation. Chisholm told him and others that Chisholm’s wife, Colleen, a teacher’s union shop steward at a school in St. Francis, which is near Milwaukee, had been repeatedly moved to tears by Walker’s anti-union policies in 2011, according to the former staff prosecutor in Chisholm’s office. Chisholm said in the presence of the former prosecutor that his wife 'frequently cried when discussing the topic of the union disbanding and the effect it would have on the people involved … She took it personally.' [...] The culture in the Milwaukee district attorney’s office was stoutly Democratic, the former prosecutor said, and become more so during Gov. Walker’s battle with the unions. Chisholm 'had almost like an anti-Walker cabal of people in his office who were just fanatical about union activities and unionizing. And a lot of them went up and protested. They hung those blue fists on their office walls [to show solidarity with union protestors] … At the same time, if you had some opposing viewpoints that you wished to express, it was absolutely not allowed.'	”
—Stuart Taylor

Samuel Leib, Chisholm’s private lawyer, responded to the allegations, saying they amounted to a "baseless character assault [that] is inaccurate in a number of critical ways." He added that "John Chisholm’s integrity is beyond reproach."

One of Chisholm's previous supervisors, former Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann (D), also criticized the notion that Chisholm's motivations were partisan, saying, "I knew who on my staff were the political people, and John Chisholm was not one of them until he ran for office."

Dan Bice, of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, found that Mike Lutz, a former Milwaukee police officer who had worked in Chisholm's office as an unpaid community service special prosecutor between late January and early August 2011, was Taylor's source. Lutz had also been a close family friend of Chisholm and his wife, Colleen, as Lutz's policing partner was Colleen's brother, Jon Osowski.

In his column the next day, Bice said that Lutz was, indeed, Taylor's source and also disclosed that Lutz suffered from PTSD after being shot on the job. Bice wrote that Lutz was formerly close to the Chisholm family before a falling-out ensued. Bice detailed an alleged voicemail in which an apparently intoxicated Lutz leveled death threats against Chisholm and his family.

On July 26, 2015, Lutz committed suicide in the presence of Menomonee Falls police officers. According to Wisconsin Watchdog reporter M.D. Kittle, "Multiple sources tell Wisconsin Watchdog that Lutz lived an agonized life in the years after he was shot while on the job in 2005. Things got worse, those sources say, after he went public about Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm’s 'hyper-partisan' pursuit of Republican Gov. Scott Walker."

Recent news

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Stuart Taylor, Jr. - Google News

See also

• John Doe investigations related to Scott Walker
• American Media Institute

External links

• Stuart Taylor Jr.'s Website