It was so legal that the GOP legislature subsequently eliminated the Doe probe process -- a long-standing tool in Wisconsin organized-crime investigations -- for any politically related activity. After the fact, they in effect admitted their guilt by getting rid of the tool going forward. Now they can cheat with impunity!
Millions of pages? Not surprising that potentially campaign-related records would be that large. After all, prosecutors who subpoena records using a lawful court order don't in advance have any way to sift through them. Which is why FBI agents in federal cases show up at, say, Manafort's house and cart out entire computers. It was a set of forensic searches of numerous individuals involved in the campaign activity, based on probable cause and approved by a court after the John Doe special prosecutor -- a Republican! -- provided a convincing legal justification for these searches.
And here's the probable cause in the Walker Doe in the Doe probe: Millions -- even tens of millions -- of dollars in contributions were solicited and sent to supposedly "independent" campaign groups at times in coordination between candidate Scott Walker personally and the guys running those independent groups. That kind of coordination ("collusion," if you prefer) is still illegal, despite the Wisconsin Supreme Court's decision that pre-empted the investigation in mid-flight. The court ham-handedly misquoted the U.S. Supreme Court in that regard.
Further, the Wisconsin high court included several conservative justices who received large campaign cash support from those same "independent" groups, yet those justices -- ignoring another U.S. Supreme Court decision -- declined to recuse themselves. A classic Republican define-on-the-fly whitewash operation.
What Trump has been trying to do in the Mueller probe -- close it down before it can complete a full investigation-- was precisely what the Republicans and conservative action groups succeeded in doing in Wisconsin.
In typical overreach, the ever-so-aggrieved targets of the quashed Wisconsin probe are now using the state's GOP attorney general (a real political hack) to go after the former special prosecutor by using and thus making public some of the very subpoenaed documents that the Wisconsin Supreme Court, at the urging of the targets, earlier ordered destroyed (a federal court blocked that destruction of evidence).
To prove his case against the special prosecutor et. al., the attorney general clearly has been cherry-picking those preserved documents. Look, extraneous information! Yet the "independent" groups in their petition to the Wisconsin court claimed public disclosure of the documents would slander them. Yet some of them had already leaked information about the closed-door investigation selectively, in effect outing themselves so they could build a privacy-violation argument.
In short, they're saying: It's perfectly okay that we leaked information about ourselves so we could claim our names were being sullied in getting the state supreme court to kill the inquiry, but The Guardian story and any other leaks no matter their origin (and we haven't been able to figure that part out) are crimes against us, so the former special prosecutor should take the fall.
They're also in effect saying: The law of the time be damned; courts and prosecutors had no right to investigate our activity, despite some of our own words and records implicating ourselves in criminal activity. Which is why when we're done making this prosecutor guy an example of what we do to people who question our business, we'll again ask the court to destroy the evidence he and his team collected against us.
So it's a book-burning, of sorts. And if someone ever develops a selective memory-wiping device, Republicans might then insist that all state residents undergo the procedure so no one recalls a thing about this utterly sordid and crass affair. This whole GOP operation has been a complete George Orwell mind fuck.
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