Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

Thong Models, Racist Rants, and Other Salacious Bits from Scott Walker’s Secret Email Trove

By Ben Jacobs

You weren’t supposed to see these 28,000 pages of documents from the GOP star’s campaign. Here’s why.

Secret routers. Thong models. Aides who compare homeless people to dogs. A trove of 28,000 pages of documents from an investigation of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s 2010 campaign could prove more than a little embarrassing for Walker. The Wisconsin governor, who is talked about as a potential presidential candidate in 2016 and is facing re-election in November, is shown to have known more about a secret email system in his office while serving as Milwaukee County Executive than he has admitted. The system was designed to enable his staffers to do political work on his campaign from the office, a major no-no under Wisconsin’s ultra strict ethics laws. The documents also contain numerous other embarrassing details, including a racist email and Walker taking urgent action to order the firing of a doctor who may have worked as a thong model in the past. But these documents don’t just trip a bit over the ethics line. They stumble face-first.

These are 5 of the most embarrassing—and juiciest—moments from the documents:

Link To Secret Emails
Walker’s staff set up a secret wireless router in the Milwaukee County Executive’s office, which they used to communicate via personal addresses about political business. The idea was to shield their communications from scrutiny and evade state public records law. In exchange between two Walker aides about the process, one wrote “consider yourself now in the ‘inner circle’” and said “I use this private account to communicate quite a bit with [Walker].”

Walker Must Have Known
Just one day before Walker was elected Governor in 2010, an investigator for the Milwaukee County district attorney testified that it’s likely Walker was aware that county employees were using personal laptops and private email accounts to do political work while on the clock. After one employee was busted for making pro-Walker comments on websites while at work, the future governor emailed “We cannot afford another story like this one. No one can give them any reason to do another story. That means no laptops, no web sites, no time away during the workday, et cetera.”

No Thongs
Scott Walker is no Sisqo when it comes to his fashion preferences. When Walker was notified in April 2010 that a recently hired doctor at the Milwaukee County Behavior Health Division apparently was a thong model, he had no hesitation about terminating her. “Get rid of the MD ASAP,” he emailed. Although the doctor was “competent” there were concerns because “she has a varied life style outside of her medical profession.”

“Hilarious”, “So True” and Totally Offensive
Kelly Rindfleisch, Walker’s former deputy chief of staff who was the only person to plead guilty to a felony as a result of the investigation that produced the documents, received an email in 2010 that compared welfare recipients to dogs because they are “mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who the r [sic] Daddys [sic] are.” Her response, “That is so hilarious and so true.”

The Racist Nightmare
Walker’s former chief of staff Thomas Nardelli forwarded a chain email to Rindfleisch and other “unknown recipients” that described a nightmare in which someone wakes as a “black disabled Jewish homosexual with a Mexican boyfriend.” The kicker to it is that the worst part is that the person in the nightmare experience ends up being a Democrat too.