Under the Great Seal of the state of Wisconsin, Circuit Court Judge Steven Ebert leans forward on his elbows, an even, cool gaze scanning the oak-paneled room. Fifteen jurors clutch notebooks, eyes fixed on the witness stand. Three camera operators film from behind a glass panel. Two prosecutors and one lawyer for each of the defendants – former state Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen and former legislative aide Sherry Schulz – sit at tables strewn with piles of paper. In a Dane County courtroom, the career of longtime state political leader Jensen is slowly collapsing.

One diminutive, unassuming woman sits among observers at the back of the room. Gripping a tape recorder, notebook and pen, she scratches out notes, covering the trial for the local paper.

She is the reason each person is in the courtroom.

In May 2001, this reporter – Dee J. Hall – published a series of articles in the Wisconsin State Journal. It was the culmination of seven months of investigative work, and possibly the pinnacle of her career as an investigative reporter. The articles, co-authored by State Journal reporter Phil Brinkman, sparked an investigation into the illegal campaign work being done by taxpayer-funded state caucuses.

The investigation led to criminal charges against a half-dozen individuals: former Sen. Brian Burke (D-Milwaukee), former Senate Majority Leader Chuck Chvala, (D-Madison), former Assembly Majority Leader Steve Foti (R-Oconomowoc), former Assembly Assistant Majority Leader Bonnie Ladwig (R-Racine), former Speaker Jensen (R-Waukesha), and former aide Schultz.

All were convicted. Burke (one felony, one misdemeanor), Chvala (two felonies) and Foti (one misdemeanor) got jail sentences and were ordered to pay restitution. Jensen, convicted of three felonies and one misdemeanor, Schultz, convicted of one felony, and Ladwig, convicted of one misdemeanor, will all be sentenced on May 16.

The scandal was the most serious to rock the state Capitol in decades. It ruined careers. It forced the abolition of the caucuses. It spurned calls for other reforms.

Moreover, it clearly established Hall, 45, as the state’s premier investigative reporter, a reputation she’s augmented with solid reporting on possible miscarriages of justice and the alleged misbehavior of former Overture Center director Bob D’Angelo. She and Brinkman have won numerous national and local journalism awards. The pair were finalists for Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and won top honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and Wisconsin Newspapers Association. This Saturday, the Milwaukee Press Club will name Hall “Newspaper Journalist of the Year” for Wisconsin in 2005.

And it all began with a routine assignment.

Red flags

Hall credits another scandal for her desire to take up journalism. In the early 1970s, when she was in her early teens, two intrepid Washington Post reporters unraveled the story of a break-in at the Watergate office building, leading ultimately to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

“I thought if the Washington Post hadn’t reported what it had, we’d have a crook in the White House and not know it,” she says. “Journalists are uniquely positioned to uncover corruption because we don’t depend on the companies, agencies or institutions that we cover for our livelihood. No one can fire us or cut our pay if we point out abuses.”

Hall was born Dee Michaelis in Beloit, but spent her childhood in Madison. When she was 16, she moved with her family to Crown Point, Indiana, where she began writing for the high school paper.

Her efforts as writer and editor won her a small scholarship to Indiana University. She wrote her first investigative article, about a religious cult on campus, for the student newspaper, The Indiana Daily Student. She graduated with distinction in December 1981, receiving degrees in journalism and Spanish.

It was at the Daily Student that Michaelis got to know her future husband, Andy Hall, one of the paper’s editors. “He was dating my roommate,” she relate, “and I was dating his.” When both couples broke up, Dee and Andy began dating. They married in 1988, while both were working for the Arizona Republic.

After the birth of their first child, Molly, the couple decided to move back closer to their families. In 1991, both came to work at Wisconsin State Journal as what Hall calls “a package deal.” At the time, Dee concedes, Andy was considered the bigger catch. While both had won awards for their reporting, Andy “was a much bigger name in journalism than I was. I had done good work but nothing that set the house on fire.”

In fact, Andy Hall was one of the reporters who broke the Charles Keating savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s. And he was considered an early expert in computer-assisted reporting, a specialized reporting technique involving data analysis.

Back in Madison, Dee worked part-time while raising the couple’s two daughters, Molly and Monica (now 15 and 11). She covered general news and did investigative stories, winning various awards from the Milwaukee Press Club throughout the 1990s. In early fall 2000, she stumbled onto the caucus story while covering a state Assembly race.

The truth is, reporters consider election stories perfunctory, and not especially desirable. Only a handful of electoral contests are actually competitive, yet newspapers must cover them all. At the State Journal, as elsewhere, editors spread the pain by assigning electoral stories to various reporters.

Hall’s assignment was to cover the 79 th Assembly district, where there were three contenders: Republican incumbent Rep. Rick Skindrud, Democrat Sondy Pope-Roberts and independent Bob Menamin. On the day of the September primary, tragic struck: Jim Roberts, the husband of Pope-Roberts, died suddenly from pancreatic cancer. Hall wanted to know whether Pope-Roberts would remain in the race but, out of respect, was reluctant to contact her directly. So instead, she called Jake Wittwer, the campaign manager listed on Pope-Roberts’ press release.

As Hall spoke with Wittwer, she picked up on his discomfort. “He seemed very reticent to have his name in the paper,” says Hall. “My common sense told me his actions were not normal.”

A simple computer search told Hall that Wittwer was a state employee, working for the Assembly Democratic Caucus, one of the four caucuses – one each for the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and the Assembly – assigned to provide research and policy support for state legislators.

Despite her years in journalism, Hall admits her experience covering the Legislature was rather limited. “I was not a Capitol reporter,” she says. “I didn’t even know what a caucus was.” But she knew it was against the law for state workers to campaign for political candidates on state time, using state resources.

In retrospect, it seems clear that Hall’s naiveté proved to be an advantage. Whereas the casual collusion between caucuses and candidates may have seemed familiar to a reporter who covered state politics as a beat, to Hall it raised red flags. She contacted Wittwer again, this time asking how he had time to run a campaign while working full-time for the state.

“He assured me that when he took campaign calls, they were on his private cell phone and that he stepped into the hallway [outside the Assembly Democratic Caucus office],” Hall recalls. “I told him that sounded fishy and that I planned to pursue it.”

Hall at first assumed this was a small infraction. She later came to discover the immense scope and scale of the illegal campaign activity. In fact, it involved nearly every member of Wisconsin’s Legislature.

Hot on the trail

The caucuses’ illegal activities had been going on for years, shrouded in a code of silence among caucus workers, campaign professionals and legislative leaders. Insiders and government watchdogs had expressed concern, mainly to deaf ears.

In 1996, Isthmus ran an exposé based on the experience of Mo Hansen, a former Democratic caucus staffer. Hansen had put in five years, first at the Assembly’s caucus, then the Senate’s, before resigning in disgust over the campaign work he was required to do. Caucus staff members, Hansen said, “cannot effectively serve legislators as policy analysts when, at the same time, they are expected to act as de facto campaign consultants to local, state and federal candidates across the state.”

No action was taken on Hansen’s accusations; the caucuses continued their illegal activities.

The following year, the nonpartisan reform group Common Cause in Wisconsin called for the elimination of the caucus system. Executive Director Jay Heck says his assertion that the caucuses were engaged in wholesale political activity were met with disbelief: “People were saying, ‘Where’s the evidence? Where is the paper trail?’”

Another watchdog group, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, also tried to draw attention to the illegal activity. In a 1999 report, notes executive director Mike McCabe, “we described how campaign money was being effectively laundered by legislative leaders.” One section “dealt with the fact that state employees in the legislative caucus offices were being used for campaign purposes.” But, as with earlier protestations, “No one paid attention.”

State Rep. Marty Reynolds (D-Ladysmith), who served in the Assembly from 1990 to 2002, also tried to eliminate the caucuses. “It’s one of those things that made no sense to me, that taxpayers were supposed to be paying for people’s campaigns,” he says. But his efforts generated little support from among his legislative colleagues. “It was part of the system and had been for a long time. We liked having access to this kind of expertise.”

After her encounter with Wittwer, Hall approached her bosses, City Editor Joyce Dehli and Assistant City Editor Teryl Franklin, with her suspicions. “Dee made a good case as to why this was important,” says Franklin. “We thought it was worth pursuing.”

Hall contacted McCabe, who helped her understand the caucuses’ relationship with the legislative campaign committees. The two tended to work in concert, which is one reason legislative leaders, who control the committees, were big fans of the caucuses: They greatly enhanced their ability to help individual candidates, thus augmenting their personal power.

Next Hall contacted former caucus workers, hoping to get them to talk about their experiences. Eventually, several former caucus staff members came forward, admitting, says Hall, they “routinely did campaign work on state time from their state office.”

Hall deepened her investigation, astounded at the scope of the illegal activity. “Our stories uncovered cheating by all sides – Assembly Democrats and Republicans as well as Senate Democrats and Republicans.” She found herself getting angry: “I always believed that Wisconsin government was clean and efficient. It was a blow to discover that wasn’t true and hadn’t been for a long time. The behavior that I uncovered really offended me.”

Despite working more hours, Hall realized the investigation was becoming too vast for her to do alone. With her editors’ permission, she enlisted the help of colleague Brinkman, a State Journal reporter since 1993.

Brinkman was newly assigned to cover state government, beginning just after the 2000 election. He recalls approaching the caucus story skeptically: “I was very cautious that we were blowing it out of proportion.” And he was keenly aware that “people’s lives and careers [were] at stake,” which weighed on him.

“These are hard-working, diligent people, and they told me to my face they don’t campaign on state time,” says Brinkman. “They were people I dealt with every day, so I was a little more inclined to believe them.”

Eventually, Brinkman’s reservations evaporated, and he realized his sources had set out to deceive him, along with everyone else. “I have come to appreciate that many of them lied to me,” he says. “It really disappointed me.”

Brinkman used a computer program to examine phone-calling patterns from the four caucuses to non-incumbent political candidates. He found quite a few such contacts, which were much more difficult to explain away than those between the caucuses and legislative incumbents who happened to be running for office.

Other times, Hall and Brinkman were stymied by outright subterfuge. Acting on a tip, the pair made requests under the state’s open records law for photos and graphics from the 2000 campaign season. But the four caucuses either claimed they had no such documents or else delivered what Brinkman described in a recent column as “piles of legislative issue briefs, budget analyses, summaries of committee testimony and official photographs of lawmakers in action.”

When the Assembly Republican Caucus’ documents were subpoenaed by the Dane County District Attorney’s Office, caucus director Jason Kratochwill delivered more than 18 boxes of materials, including obvious campaign literature. Recently, Brinkman asked Kratochwill for an explanation.

Kratochwill claimed he had interpreted the fact that the records requesters had capitalized the words Assembly Republican Caucus to mean they were seeking only “official” ARC documents. “I'm just guessing here,” Brinkman wrote in the column, “but I doubt we would have had better luck had we asked for ‘all campaign material secretly produced by the assembly republican caucus.’”

Crimes against democracy

The big break came in early March 2001, when Hall made contact with a former caucus employee named Lyndee Wall.

For eight months during the 2000 campaign season, Wall served as administrative assistant at the Assembly Republican Caucus, answering phone calls and handling other routine office tasks. “She knew which staffers were where on which campaign,” says Hall. “She knew Sherry Schultz was the money lady, Heather Smith handled the media.”

Wall, now Lyndee Wall Woodliff, testified at the recent Jensen/Schultz trial that, to her disgust, her tasks were nearly entirely campaign-oriented. It offended her deeply that she was required to break the law as part of her job. As she put it to Hall, “I couldn't bear the fact that while I worked there, I was being paid by taxpayers to commit crimes against their democracy.”

Over the course of her employment at ARC, Wall had saved hundreds of documents demonstrating campaign activities. But getting her to give them up was not easy. Hall made several attempts to convince Wall to go public with her story.

At first Wall was reluctant, but late one night abruptly changed her mind. Mistakenly thinking Hall worked for The Capital Times, Wall contacted one of that paper’s editors, who was not pleased. “He left some irate voice mail saying, ‘Don’t have your sources call me in the middle of the night,’” Hall says, laughing.

Hall met Wall for lunch the day Wall moved out of Madison. “She handed me literally binders full of documents – hundreds of documents that laid out the whole scene,” recalls Hall. Knowing it was important Wall keep possession of the original documents – Hall believed they would be eventually subpoenaed – Hall took them to a copy machine, paying $25 to duplicate about 250 pages. “I really knew at that moment what she had handed me was very, very important.”

Equally significant was Wall’s agreement to let her name be used. “She was scared, but very determined to tell the truth about this,” Hall says. “It was a very searing experience she had had.” Wall’s cooperation allowed the State Journal to give its story a human face. But she paid a personal price: After the series appeared, so did articles and even a mock e-mail suggesting Wall was seeking to settle scores after her romance with a married GOP lawmaker ended badly.

Under pressure

In the spring of 2001, Hall and Brinkman began to write. Says Hall, “We made the decision not to [include] any unnamed sources, and to focus on the caucuses because they were really campaign central.” And the paper was intent on making sure every detail was backed by solid evidence. Says Hall, “There was a lot of pressure there.”

Still, the editing process took longer than she anticipated. Hall thought the story was “ready to go,” but her editors put the articles through a rigorous process, sending each version to the State Journal’s lawyers.

“We had to make sure it was airtight,” says Franklin, now the paper’s city editor. “That dragged it out another month or two. We put an awful lot of work into it.”

As the stories were being vetted, word spread that the State Journal was working on a major story about the caucus system. Isthmus ran an item asking why the series was being held up; The Capital Times ran a preemptive editorial entitled, “Clean Up Caucuses.”

The State Journal series began on Sunday, May 20, 2001, under the headline, “State employees secretly campaign,” with additional stories the next two days. Solidly written and edited, the articles detailed the caucuses’ extensive involvement in various campaigns.

Brian Blanchard, the Dane County District Attorney, launched a criminal investigation in early June 2001. “ There is no question that it was the series that caused this office to investigate,” says Blanchard. “I thought it laid out the nature on the problems based on what journalists could learn and gave us a good head start.”

Himself a former reporter, Blanchard says he was also prodded into action by the “silence and denial from some leaders” to the allegations in the series. And he was clearly piqued by the refusal of state Ethics Board and state Elections Board to probe the allegations on their own. (The Ethics Board did, however, broker a deal that abolished the four caucus offices.)

For whatever reason, Blanchard took the revelations in the series seriously, and did something about it. As a result, what could have been just another shot across the bow of the caucus system became a dagger through its heart.

Brinkman and Hall both play down their role in breaking the scandal. Says Brinkman, “A lot of people are saying all we did was report the obvious.” But Hall agrees the series and subsequent prosecutions have creating a much clearer division between state work and campaign activities.

“The line is very brightly drawn now,” she says. “Before, people hopped, skipped and jumped over it at will.”

Hall awaits more other changes. “I hope it has a lasting impact that will allow politicians more freedom to vote with their constituents and their consciences rather than walk lock-step with the leaders who put them in office,” she says. “Time will tell as to whether that happens.”

Article originally printed in the Isthmus, April 28, 2006. Reprinted by permission.