Meet The Guy Who Set Up Scott Walker’s Secret Internet Connection

Mind you, we’re not suggesting that a crime was committed when then-county executive Scott Walker had a secret router installed. We’re leaning toward multiple crimes. Judge for yourself:

Gov. Scott Walker’s Milwaukee County executive office was using a secret Internet system as early as the year he took office, according to a former county administrator who said he helped set up the network.

That’s several years earlier than prosecutors disclosed in a complaint against one of Walker’s former aides who was convicted of using a secret system to campaign on the taxpayers’ dime.

In an interview this week, Bob Kiefert said that in 2002, when he was Milwaukee County human resources assistant director, he was called into Walker’s office by then-deputy chief of staff Tim Russell. Kiefert showed Russell how to set up a hard-wired Internet connection using a DSL modem and a telephone line. The network allowed county executive staff to send and receive emails and surf the Web outside the public system set up by the county’s Information Management Services Division in 1998.

“They didn’t trust the IMSD county system to be the pathway or the gateway through which their emails went,” Kiefert said. “They wouldn’t have control of those emails.”

Kiefert, now retired and a Democratic Party activist in Green Bay who runs a website called Green Bay Progressive and signed the petition to recall Walker, first disclosed that he helped set up the system in a blog entry last week after more than 28,000 pages of emails and other documents from the investigation of Walker’s Milwaukee County staff were released.

Walker was not charged with wrongdoing in the secret John Doe investigation, which led to six convictions, including two related to campaigning on taxpayer time.

But he has evaded questions about what he knew about the secret system.

Gee, we wonder why…

By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.