On October 16, Wisconsin Department of Justice agents raided Wausau, Wisconsin, Mayor Doug Diny’s government office. They simultaneously searched his home, where his wife was watching the couple’s 18-month-old grandson, and the family vehicles.
More than eight months later, Wisconsin’s Democrat Attorney General Josh Kaul has yet to charge the conservative mayor with any crime, and Kaul’s Department of Justice has refused to release the search warrant application documents filed with the court.
Diny and his attorney have called Kaul’s endless “investigation” into the mayor’s removal of an unsecured absentee ballot drop box from outside city hall nothing more than a “fishing expedition.” But as we’ve learned in the land of lawfare, leftist prosecutors have grown fond of making the process the punishment for conservatives.
“It’s been crickets from that [Justice] department,” Diny told me this week on the Benjamin Yount Show on WISN in Milwaukee.
The Lincoln County judge hearing the case, however, has seemingly lost his patience with Kaul’s DOJ in its opposition to unsealing the warrant docs, which the court now plans to release with some redactions.
Kaul’s office, again, did not return The Federalist’s requests for comment and an update on the state DOJ’s peculiar investigation and suspect “election fraud” claims. Why is it taking so long for the agency to come to a charging decision? Why have DOJ attorneys resisted unsealing the warrant application? What evidence do investigators have to prove Diny committed an actual crime?
“I don’t know their motivation as to why they want to continue to drag this out but this isn’t some whodunit,” The mayor said. “If this was about election integrity we would have already been able to address all the issues and have it cleaned up.”
The mayor has said that he believes the “investigation” is drenched in politics. His suspicions are understandable.
Some twisted stuff certainly appears to be going on. As The Federalist reported last year, it seems Kaul’s agency has accused Diny of election fraud for attempting to prevent election fraud.
Drop Box Politics
The Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Division of Criminal Investigation in October took over the investigation into Diny’s Sept. 22 removal of the drop box. The conservative mayor ticked off the left when he carted away the ballot receptacle, which Diny said was not secured where it had been placed outside City Hall in advance of the opening of Wisconsin’s early voting season for November’s presidential election. Wausau City clerk Kaitlyn Bernarde subsequently returned the drop box to its position outside the building.
Wausau-area liberals were out for political blood. In April 2024, Diny had defeated the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s rising star incumbent, Mayor Katie Rosenberg, a vehement proponent of absentee ballot drop boxes and a general leftist political agenda. Diny, who in part campaigned on election integrity issues, including getting rid of absentee ballot drop boxes, had wanted the Wausau City Council to decide whether to use the drop box in November’s general election before the clerk set it up. Bernarde did not wait.
Bernarde reported the matter to then-Marathon County District Attorney Theresa Wetzsteon, a Democrat.
Leftist voter turnout organizations such as All Voting Is Local (AVL) went apoplectic when they saw a social media post of Diny in a hard hat carting off the drop box and moving it into city hall where it could be secured.
“This is an egregious and physical attack on drop boxes by an election denier who is restricting voter access to the ballot box,” the group’s director Sam Liebert declared in a press release. “The Wisconsin Attorney General needs to look into the events that took place immediately. Voters in Wausau and beyond deserve the right to vote via drop box.”
Kaul obliged. The attorney general is considered a top contender in next year’s gubernatorial election should Democrat Gov. Tony Evers decide not to seek a third term term.
And, as The Federalist has reported, the highly partisan Kaul is an old hand in politically driven but constitutionally suspect investigations and prosecutions.
‘Running Roughshod’
A little over a year ago, the Democrat held a nationally-watched press conference on the steps of the Wisconsin Capitol announcing charges in a phony “fake electors” case against two attorneys who represented President Donald Trump in contesting the results of the rigged 2020 election. Cheered on by a Democratic Party doing everything it could to stop Trump from winning a second term in 2024, Kaul criminally charged former Dane County Judge Jim Troupis and fellow Trump campaign attorney Kenneth Chesebro. The attorney general accuses the respected election law lawyers of forgery for their alternate electors strategy to protect their client as he continued his lawsuits challenging Democrat Joe Biden’s electoral victory in battleground Wisconsin.
Madison attorney Joe Bugni, who is representing Troupis in the case, has argued that the state Department of Justice is “run[ning] roughshod over the law” and abusing its prosecutorial powers.
“The State is trying to imprison Troupis for doing what the law demands,” Bugni wrote in a filing calling for the charges to be dismissed. “By criminalizing what that law — the federal law — provides, the State has done many things, the most glaring of which is to violate the Supremacy Clause, and that requires that this case must be dismissed.”
Similar to Kaul’s secret investigation into Diny, the Wisconsin DOJ fought to keep the subpoena in the alternate electors case under seal. They lost on that front, too.
Bugni is the mayor’s attorney, too.
“Apparently there’s some super secret thing in there that they don’t want us to know about, and they’re sitting on it,” Diny said in the radio interview, referring to the DOJ’s resistance to release the warrant application. “My attorney has never seen anything like it. It’s quite confusing.”
Eight months after the raids, Diny said he’s still waiting for investigators to return his electronic devices and other possessions — as he said they originally promised to do within days. Par for the course, it seems, in a politically-driven investigation shrouded in secrecy.
“It’s a mystery,” Diny said.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
