Wisconsin GOP Donor at Center of Saudi-Veterans Scandal at Trump DC Hotel

Jason Johns, former registered agent of
Saudi Arabia and Republican-linked
donor and Gov Scott Walker appointee,
is at the center of a scandal at
the Trump International D.C. hotel.

Scott Walker-appointed official, GOP pol and registered Saudi agent defends Saudi Arabia scheme funneling $100,000s to Trump

Madison, Wisconsin — A Wisconsin Republican Party-linked lobbyist was a chief organizer of the Saudi Arabia-funded scheme to fund Donald Trump's D.C. hotel by inducing veterans to front for an effort to indemnify Sandi Arabia in its role in the 911 attacks against the United States, the Wisconsin State Journal reports, (Verburg, Wisconsin State Journal). [See also Daily Kos.]

The Wisconsin State Journal contacted Johns after news of the scheme broke in a piece published by the Washington Post on Dec. 5.

Johns, of Oregon, Wisconsin, has donated $1,000s to numerous Republican officeholders, data at the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign reveals. [Enter "Johns" to generate Jason Johns and Jason E. Johns of Oregon, Wisconsin.]

Johns also donated some $1,000 to the Wisconsin State Senate Democratic Committee, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign website shows.

Reports the Wisconsin State Journal:

A Wisconsin veterans advocate and former appointee of Gov. Scott Walker was near the center of a Saudi Arabian lobbying effort that has raised eyebrows for its heavy use of the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C.

But Madison-based advocate Jason Johns said in an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal he did nothing wrong in overseeing the Saudi-funded program, which flew veterans to Washington and put them up at President Donald Trump’s hotel while they spoke out against a law the Saudis wanted overturned.

Jason Johns was appointed by Gov. Scott Walker (R) as deputy secretary to the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs (WDVA) in 2011 after a Republican-backed law gave Walker the sole authority for hiring and firing executive-level WDVA political appointees, (Stein, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel).

Johns is listed as founder and president (2005-present) of Wisconsin Legislative Strategies, Inc. lobbying firm in Johns' LinkedIn webpage.

"Johns said he registered as an agent of the Saudi government when he started working for  Qorvis/MSLGroup [Saudi lobbying group] and let the registration lapse in 2017 after the program ended," reports the Wisconsin State Journal.

Johns defended the Saudi Arabian scheme. Reports the Wisconsin State Journal:

Johns said Thursday he wasn’t involved in booking the Trump property, and he didn’t buy the implication that it was wrong.

'The undertone here is that Qorvis purchased all of the hotel rooms at the Trump Hotel in order to curry ‘favor’ and/or ‘influence’ with President Trump as he was coming in to office,' Johns said.  

Nothing to see here, may become the new Republican Party slogan.

Wisconsin Dairy Polluters Get Green Light to Expand and Pollute, as Milk Is Dumped Across Nation

Wisconsin homeowners, businesses and communities are not counted as stakeholders as the Republican-Party pushes to give factory farm owners the legal power to give themselves pollution permits, (Verburg, Wisconsin State Journal).

The audacious move would help transform already-weak state protections of clean and safe water as the Republican project to disempower the Department of Natural Resources, (DNR), continues, (Bergquist, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), (Verburg, Wisconsin State Journal).

This pollution regime effectively gives decision-making power to industrialized agriculture, CAFOs, and nobody else.

As Donald Ystad of Rome, Wisconsin, in Adams County writes:

The 'social license to operate' is defined by Gunningham, Kagan and Thornton as 'the demands on and expectations for a business enterprise that emerge from neighborhoods, environmental groups, community members, and other elements of the surrounding civil society.' Social license is an element of corporate social responsibility. It is premised on the idea that while regulators grant permits, it is communities that grant permission. It’s that 'handshake' that occurs between an incoming business and the people around it, the agreement that the business proposition is good for everyone (Ystad, Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune).

Under Republican initiatives, Neighborhoods, environmental groups and community members are no longer regarded as possessing status worthy of a handshake, much less consultation and approval.

The Republican and polluter push for more CAFOs, that are given the power to pollute with no public input, comes as the mammoth milk glut continues.

As noted here, even as the corporations' dairy CAFOs become ever more brazen and ambitious to transform America into a colonial entity in which land and air exist legally for the use of corporate power, the ideological demand constraint on many Americans persists.

DNR Story Shows Wisconsin State Journal at Deceitful Worst

Wisconsin DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp is featured in a propaganda piece this morning on the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal.

The writer is Steven Verburg; the writing (and presumably the editing) highlights a major reason our household no longer subscribes to Wisconsin's second largest daily.

The 2,500-word piece is the worst type of trash the State Journal puts out, illustrating how badly the Republican propaganda sheet misleads readers and shills for their favored political interests.


Online the headline reads: As DNR woes grow, former critic says she's its best protector.

That's a misleading headline.

The headline cites "woes" (caused by what or whom?) as though the DNR has passively experienced some unknown malady caused by unknown agents. In reality, Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans have worked to change the mission and operation of the DNR with Stepp on the front lines.

The headline shields Stepp in the cloak of DNR "critic" and "protector."

In the lede paragraph Verburg recites a story explaining Stepp's reluctant steps before being appointed by Scott Walker to the DNR secretary position in 2011.

The fact-based world is something different.

Scott Walker, Attorney General Bard Schimel, legislative Republicans and Stepp have devastated the resource protection and planning objectives of the agency, (most of what the DNR does is planning and soliciting input from stakeholders), and rebuilt the DNR as a tool for polluters.

Here's Verberg on Stepp:

She fought to streamline environmental regulations, earned a 'zero' rating from conservationists, gathered testimony about overzealous DNR employees, and authored a bill to criminalize state worker 'retaliation' against companies seeking pollution permits.

Frustrated by the slow pace of change, Stepp left the Senate when her four-year term ended. She worked for Republican causes until 2011 when the party took control of state government, and Gov. Scott Walker appointed her as the DNR’s top administrator.

Here I was thinking Republicans like Stepp were fronting for polluters like Menard's and other heavy donors to Walker and other Republicans.

No, Verburg assures, Stepp fought for streamlining, against the overzealous and the retaliatory.

Wow, Stepp is good.

Elsewhere, Verburg presents the DNR's Stepp as merely a passive regulator working to find common ground against Republican legislators:

'We have made terrific inroads with some the toughest critics in the Legislature against this agency who have a very skewed perception of who makes up this agency,' Stepp said.

The agency must be apolitical publicly, deferring to elected officials, Stepp said. As DNR secretary she said she has no opinion on whether environmental regulations are excessive or inadequate. The DNR’s job is to put the law into practice, she said.

Stepp is just an objective good-heated public servant; she said so herself.

Of course Stepp's opinions are easy to find. Notes Kewaunee Cares (Facebook):

She doesn't have an opinion? Stepp offered her commentary on our health and water crisis in the [heavily polluted] Kewaunee [County] through an Op-Ed piece in the Green Bay Gazette, marginalizing our problems.

Stepp writes, "The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has been working for more than a year with multiple stakeholder groups to address water quality issues in and around Kewaunee County. That work is not over but based on our discussions so far, we have been able to take action on several fronts."

"The department believes in making decisions and finding solutions based on sound science and so we commissioned scientific research to gather data about the quality of wells in Kewaunee County."

That's a lot of rhetoric to begin a piece on an issue about which Stepp has no opinion.

Of course, pointing this out would require the State Journal's Verburg to dig all the way back to ... May 2016. That kind of in-depth journalism apparently is beyond the means of the WSJ.

Two Largest Wisconsin Dailies Call for Scott Walker to Hold Press Conference on Emails

From left to right: Tim Russell, Scott Walker and Brian Pierick
"Don't think for a minute that Walkergate or its effect will end ... ." 

Update: Even Fox News host, Chris Wallace, grows frustrated with Scott Walker's evasions.

WALLACE: Did you have your own private e-mail account?

SCOTT WALKER: It’s one of those where I point out district attorney has reviewed every single one of these issues.

WALLACE: But sir, you’re not answering my question.

SCOTT WALKER: No, because I’m not going to get into 27,000 different pieces of information.
---
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the Wisconsin State Journal are both editorially supportive of Scott Walker to a fault.

Now, the two largest Wisconsin dailies are calling on Walker to come clean with an extended press conference that ends when the press is done with questions, not when Scott Walker declares this is "old news."

It's not old news when the probe that resulted in 15 convictions involving his former top aides, who as the emails reveal, acted on Scott Walker's orders, is now a public fact shown in black and white. Walker knew, was a participant and lied about it. Why?

Scott Walker cannot weasel away on this one.

From a PR perspective, as the editorials writers at the Journal-Sentinel and State Journal are aware, a hours-long, question-and-answer session explaining and apologizing is the right thing to do.

From a good government perspective, it's imperative.

Everyone is wondering why Scott Walker was not prosecuted when the court-ordered release of the 27,000 emails shows Walker was the top dog in the conspiracy to run a secret political campaign out of a public office.

Scott Walker even parades this fact of not being prosecuted in his seconds-long encounters with friendly, GOP-aligned journalists.

I wasn't prosecuted is a fair point.

As are the voluminous emails proving Walker knew and directed action on the secret email system, and after his aide was caught ordered that the use of the secret email system stop, shortly before the Milwaukee County Executive office was raided by law enforcement.

As noted by Ruth Conniff in The Progressive Magazine, there's nowhere left to hide now.

Scott Walker Is Desperate So Wisconsin State Journal Runs Pathetic Flack Piece

Here's Steven Verburg's (GOP) fronting for Scott Walker in his piece on Sunday's front page.

More than 28,000 pages of secret emails and other documents released under court order last week illustrate in sharp detail the extent to which modern electronic devices allowed Scott Walker’s top taxpayer-funded staff in the Milwaukee County executive’s office to be secretly converted into political campaign assets in 2010.

But his former aides were betrayed by the supposedly hidden laptops, wireless connections and Web-based email accounts after prosecutors seized hard drives that stored reams of messages. ...

Scott Walker used the secret, illegal router email system; he "urged both county employees and campaign aides to go to news websites and post comments promoting him and his record, " (Stein, Marley and Bice. MJS), and after his aide Darlene Wink was caught, Walker then Walker ordered the system shut down.

To state his aides were "betrayed" is like saying an idiot who fires a pistol at a man for being black was betrayed by the bullet.

No, Walker and his aides were not "betrayed," as Steven Verburg writes while pretending to be a journalist, instead of a Walker flack.

Walker and his aide are perpetrators who ran a campaign for governor from the office of Milwaukee County Executive, and even found time during business hours to sneak in their own brand of humor about Jews, blacks, gays and disabled Americans on emails that no decent person regards as anything but vile.

As Democurmudgeon writes (and I am posting almost his entire text; he won't mind as he as repulsed as I am) watch this video at bottom:

MSNBC's Chris Hayes hit on the real revelation of the newly released stack of emails. Hayes points out "the shear jaw dropping offensiveness" of a few of those emails.

>Hayes: "What kind of work environment exactly would it be all okay to get this in your inbox and then forward it to an unspecified amount of coworkers and subordinates...but think about the kind of work environment in which a chief of staff sends this kind of email to his subordinates. An email that is explicitly homophobic, racist, antisemitic and offensive in every way possible? ... These are the thoughts people who are in charge of things like, oh I don't know, running the states welfare system." 

This is who Scott Walker and new Republican Party are.

If anyone is wondering if Republican officeholder criticized Scott Walker's former chief of staff and other Walker aides for this crap, forget it, no GOP officeholder in Wisconsin ever publicly criticizes Scot Walker and his staff.

State Journal Runs Good Piece on New PTSD Rules

Steven Verburg has a good, local follow-up in the State Journal on veterans' reaction to the new PTSD VA rules that cut through the red tape with which our veterans contend.

Verburg presents the case of local veteran Stephen Jackson, who served in Vietnam from 1972 to 1973, was diagnosed with PTSD and still can not get benefits--but likely can now under the new rules.

The piece dwells too much on the knockdown; too much neocon twaddle about the potential for fraud and the ever-present danger that our veterans are a bunch of liars.

"Dane County Veterans Service Officer Michael Jackson said he expects claims from Vietnam-era and earlier veterans 'will be coming out of the woodwork, grasping at straws,' and unrealistic claims will be denied," writes Verburg.

The sourcing of veteran service officers ignores what is common knowledge among veteran advocates: Veterans service officers are often part of the problem. It's a roll of the dice for veterans of whom they talk to.

And the neocon, ‘crat culture that veterans run into? No mention.

And describing veterans as coming out of the woodwork and grasping at straws? Sounds like a VA bureaucrat trying to deny, delay and hope the veterans die.

Talk to any Vietnam veteran and they will tell you in so many words: It's often guys waiting and listening but not engaging who come home the worst for it. But it's unpredictable.

Servicemen and women take an oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution, but their word on how they're doing afterwards is not taken at face value.