By: Brian Sikma

Thursday a special prosecutor in Madison declared that there will be no charges in the alleged choking incident that took place in June between Supreme Court justices David Prosser and Ann Walsh Bradley. After reviewing reports, Patricia Barrett declared that there was no basis for charges to be filed against either justice. Bradley, a liberal, had accused Prosser, a conservative, of putting her in a chokehold during a heated discussion between justices working on a case involving Governor Walker’s controversial budget repair bill.

For Prosser, the declaration that no charges would be filed was a victory. He insisted that he had done nothing wrong and refused to go into details of the incident because of the investigation. Bradley, on the other hand, appeared to leak the story to a Soros-funded liberal journalism group that ran the story before seeking verification of the facts from other potential sources. That didn’t stop the story from taking off and gaining state and national media attention just weeks after Prosser won a narrow and hotly contested re-election race.

In January, Justice David Prosser was hardly a household name in Wisconsin. In response to groundbreaking reforms they opposed, left-wing and union groups attempted to turn the non-partisan spring election for Prosser’s seat into a referendum on Republican majorities in the state legislature and Governor Scott Walker. Prosser eked out a victory after it was discovered that a clerical error failed to include votes in a strongly Republican area as part of the final election night tally.

Charging that the election was stolen, liberals attempted to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of Prosser by going after him personally. Fellow Justice Bradley’s claims of being the victim of a physical assault by Prosser provided a perfect line of attack.

But the left overreached.

Unsubstantiated rumors that were cited as facts in the initial story about the supposed incident did little to build the credibility of the Soros-funded journalism group that broke the news. Mainstream outlets picked up the story with little – if any – further attempts to verify the facts.

Yet the way the initial investigation was handled, in addition to the questionable journalism practices used to break the story, started to raise questions. Capitol Police Chief Charles Tubbs inexplicably turned the investigation over to the Dane County Sheriff’s Department. Tubbs qualifications were called into question when he refused to adequately protect the state Capitol from damage during the spring protests.

When the news surfaced that Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney was a political backer of liberal Supreme Court justices and a former union official, Media Trackers uncovered a political contribution made by Capitol Police Chief Tubbs to Mahoney. The news that he took over an investigation from a political supporter forced Mahoney to distance himself personally from the investigation. Mahoney had a previous run-in with ethics when he was formally reprimanded for a conflict of interest that he had in an investigation he worked on at the Dane County Sheriff’s Department before running for sheriff.

After three attempts to remove Justice Prosser from the court, it is not clear what – if anything – left-leaning groups will try next.  They lost the election he ran in, they lost the long and expensive recount that came after it, and now the charges that some publicly hoped would be true have been found without merit.