Have you heard of Tom Kean, Jr.? He’s a congressman from New Jersey, the son of a governor, who kind of disappeared during the middle of his campaign. As in, he hadn’t voted or been seen in public for 77 days, with the media only getting cryptic comments about a mysterious illness. After the news coverage escalated with headlines about him being “missing,” he suddenly resurfaced in a phone call to a newspaper at long last.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul isn’t quite Tom Kean, yet, but it’s getting close. The Democrat attorney general and nepo baby – privately derided by even Democrats for his laziness – has been running one of the most bizarre campaigns in state history. He’s running a Phantom of the Opera campaign.
Meanwhile an attorney general group just pumped $500,000 into ad buys to boost his opponent, the relentlessly public safety-focused Fond du Lac County DA Eric Toney. If ever there was a guy created in central casting for this job, it’s Toney. A runner with a dog named Patton and a retired cop dad, Toney, 41, has been DA since 2012 and has also served as the president of the Wisconsin District Attorneys Association. He was even named DA of the year.
Kaul barely appears to be running a campaign at all.
That would matter less if he was on top of things at work, but the crime lab has been collapsing around his feet for years. And he can’t even blame Covid anymore, like he did for years. That excuse ran out in 2021. Toney is highlighting Kaul’s broken promises. And Kaul is barely responding, when he can be found at all.
Maybe one should be concerned about Kaul at this point? Where is Wisconsin’s AWOL AG? Is he tucked away under his quilt binge watching old Suits episodes on Netflix? Is he daydreaming about holding meetings at Starbucks like Sarah Godlewski? Why is he dialing it in?
We’ve talked to a person who has been on zoom or teams meetings with Kaul and supposedly he usually keeps his video off. One imagines him in his snoopy pajamas during the day and not wanting anyone to know. Suddenly, his lackluster flirtation with a gubernatorial run makes sense.
Governor Kaul? Nope
Let’s be honest. Kaul should be the leading Democrat candidate for governor right now. He’s the Attorney General, essentially the state’s top cop. He’s won statewide several times. He has name ID. He’s not a socialist who wants to abolish police. He doesn’t do much for police as AG, but he doesn’t want to abolish them.
But his possible run ended as quickly as a round of speed dating. Suddenly, he just wasn’t interested anymore. Or maybe Democrats weren’t interested in him. Mutual non-attraction. Not a team player, folks scoff behind the scenes. That’s saying a lot considering the Democrat gubernatorial clown car doesn’t exactly have a bunch of heavyweights inside. It’s crammed with a socialist who wants to abolish police and prisons, a guy who looked crazy on video, a nutty legislator, and Tom Barrett’s godson. The Party should have BEGGED Kaul to run. Wisconsin Dem honcho Devin Remiker should have brought over a gift basket of old Sixteen Candles DVDs. Whatever it takes. The fact they didn’t speaks volumes.
Maybe Josh Kaul’s heart just isn’t in it anymore. It’s happened before. Republican JB Van Hollen fought tooth-and-nail for the AG seat and then one day just up and decided he didn’t want it anymore. He now spends his time recording radio ads and writing op-eds for a group representing FanDuel. And Kaul has become the latest AG coat hanger.
Maybe it’s time to issue a silver alert.
A Nepo Baby
How is Kaul a nepo baby? He holds his mom’s seat. The late Peg Lautenschlager, God rest her soul, once drove a state car into a ditch drunk and lost the job, but her son has redeemed her. Kaul is Peg’s son. It’s interesting how many people don’t know that.
Another fact a lot of people don’t know?
Kaul was also a wild-eyed liberal election lawyer for the firm behind the discredited Steele dossier. In fact, before he was AG, Kaul once demanded a hand recount of all Wisconsin ballots on behalf of his client… Hillary Clinton. If a Republican tried that, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Molly Beck would label them an election denier. Kaul himself would probably find a way to destroy their lives with weaponized prosecution of a novel legal theory. Like he’s trying to do to Trump’s former election lawyer, Jim Troupis, even though his own office once said, in writing, that what Troupis did wasn’t a crime. Kaul, who is Ivy League educated, also had a short and undistinguished stint as a Baltimore prosecutor.
The AWOL AG appears bored when it comes to the core functions of his critically important agency, and he’s a poor manager. This isn’t rhetoric. The metrics prove it. He’s taking in far fewer crime lab cases than his Republican predecessor, by far, but it’s taking longer to process DNA and other key evidence. This was an issue he ran on. It bedeviled his mom. And he just seems bored. But the crime lab is needed for prosecutions all over the state. In fact, Kaul should know the seriousness because a man was left on the streets during Lautenschlager’s tenure due to delayed processing of evidence in a rape case, and he ended up being present at the murder of a beloved state drug agent.
Kaul’s been awful on open records too even though he’s supposed to be the top enforcer of open records laws. He stalled one of our open records requests for 1.5 years until after the last AG race was over. It showed that his office botched the response to a federal audit into problems in crime victims’ services. There’s nothing more important than that.
His PR office literally never responds. It’s like writing a black hole. Even Evers’ office responds (unless it’s about commutations). The Milwaukee mayor responds. Kaul’s complete lack of response is unusual.
tribal leader boyd (l)
He’s been stone silent on a host of public safety issues, such as calls to defund the police, and Tony Evers’ commutation scheme that includes murderers. His office was excoriated by a northern Wisconsin tribal leader for stripping the northern tier of the state of narcotics investigators. She flat out said it’s caused de*ths. He could have told the public that Jacob Blake had a knife to quell the rioting that torched Kenosha but didn’t.
In other words, he’s been MIA on lots of important Wisconsin things.
Lawsuits, Lawsuits Everywhere
Kaul only pops his head out of the prairie dog hole to make a partisan comment or two or to file lawsuits against the feds or prediction markets, the latter of which should make potential tribal donors quite pleased. It didn’t please the feds, who promptly counter sued, arguing the state doesn’t have the authority to regulate prediction markets at all.
Kaul has done one key thing with his time, filing partisan lawsuits like a frenzied medieval lawsuit axe thrower. He’s done what he can to push back on efforts to get illegal immigrants who commit crimes out of the country. He’s shown no interest in protecting girls’ sports. He doesn’t want the federal government to get foodshare data to check for fraud. But federal lawsuits? He’s all in.
His campaign X page has tweeted exactly three times since he announced his re-election in October. His Facebook page too. He emerged briefly from winter hibernation to GOTV for other candidates in the April election. But posts about his own campaign? NADA since November (his government AG page is more active.) We even checked his campaign’s Bluesky page. If there’s anywhere Kaul would be active, it would be Bluesky. Same boring three posts.
He can’t even muster quotes when news stories feature his opponent, Toney.
Kaul’s campaign website contains no endorsements, no press releases, no news stories.
Toney, who is very active on social media when he’s not prosecuting killers and the like, has raised more money than the incumbent AG this time around. Last time, Kaul raised $4 million more than Toney and won by only 35,000 votes.
Kaul seems to fixate obsessively on Washington, not Wisconsin. That’s the only thing he’s not MIA on. One envisions him hunkered down at an old 1980s Galaga game, punching the button to legally fire wildly… at just one target. Trump.
For example, when the feds restricted federal funding supporting gender mutilation surgeries of minors, Kaul leapt into action like a humanoid robot that suddenly got its battery inserted. He sued to stop it. He has filed 40 such lawsuits, many with limited or no direct connection to Wisconsin. He hired an environmental lawyer funded by a center funded by Michael Bloomberg. He even joined a challenge against the federal government’s termination of probationary employees because that has to do with Wisconsin…what?
He sees his job as the Chief Lawsuit Filer. He has a right to do this, but voters have a right to wonder whether it’s a good use of his time, especially since he appears to be MIA on so much else. Also like him or hate him, but Trump won Wisconsin. So, does Kaul really have a mandate to narrow his job duties in this brazenly partisan way?
Meanwhile, Eric Toney’s eyes practically form laser beams that zero in on one thing and one thing only… public safety in Wisconsin. Zapping crime is what Toney, the son of a cop, seems to care about with a relentless focus. Yes, he cares about the other aspects of the AG office, but the affable Toney – who is always easily reachable and very transparent – cares mostly about public safety. He lights up like a Christmas tree when the topic comes up. Which it does a lot since he has a DA job prosecuting crooks.
Toney cares so much about the crime lab, that as DA, he even helped Kaul secure additional funding for more crime lab analysts, and stood next to him for the announcement. It didn’t matter; Kaul still bungled the crime lab, and the backlogs still soared. Scratch another Kaul excuse off the crime lab list. There’s always been a series of cascading excuses. At some point, the buck has to stop with Josh Kaul.
Pragmatic and not terribly partisan, the Republican prosecutor proved his rule of law rhetoric wasn’t BS when he was handed two hot potato cases, involving a Democrat and a Republican mayor, and didn’t turn either into a political sideshow, deciding them on the same day, and prosecuting neither (because he didn’t believe the evidence warranted charges). How refreshing. He has prosecuted voter fraud when it’s warranted – clear cases like people who double voted or voted in a community where they don’t live – but he’s never gone down crazy election conspiracy rabbit holes about secret algorithms or whatever. He takes tough cases, prosecuting fentanyl deaths when other DAs take a pass. He’s prosecuted a number of violent crimes involving illegal immigrants.
You may see the tall and lean Toney at any GOP event throughout the state, likely wearing a blue vest with a DA seal and perfectly crisp collar. He’s practically worn his car out driving around the state. There’s such a genuinely warm bond now between Toney and the base he’s met for years that he hasn’t even drawn a primary opponent. The guy is everywhere, and he pretty much picked up where he left off after he narrowly lost to Kaul last time, when Toney was dragged down by weak gubernatorial coattails.
But Kaul actually campaigned last time. He really tried. And he benefited from a stronger liberal media, which ran endless cover for him. Things that would have been a story 20 years ago suddenly weren’t. In fact, 15 retired DCI agents and administrators slammed Kaul, calling him a “disaster for law enforcement” who has “mismanaged the Office of the Attorney General.” Wasn’t a huge story.
You’d think it would be newsworthy if the mother of the victim of one of the most notorious monsters in state history blasted Kaul for ignoring her concerns, right? It wasn’t.
That actually happened. The mom of Lisa Ann French, the little trick or treater murdered by monster Gerald Turner on Halloween Day, blasted Kaul. Kaul “failed me, and he’s failed Wisconsin,” she said. The media decided, bafflingly, that it was not a story. Even when Kaul coldly walked away on video when asked about Lisa’s mom being angry at him, the media decided, nothing to see here.
They tried to run cover for Kaul on the crime lab too, comparing Kaul against Kaul and regurgitating his press releases. We compared Kaul to his predecessor, Brad Schimel, and showed that Kaul was taking in fewer cases with longer delays in many key categories.
This time? It’s weird.
Is Kaul counting on a blue wave year? Does he think he can coast on his political surfboard because some voters are angry at Trump? Is filing a few lawsuits really doing his job? Maybe he’s a nice man in private, and better suited to only being the guy who takes the kids on the soccer run, and not the state’s top cop.
If so, it’s a potential mistake. Toney is an aggressive and pragmatic candidate with crossover potential, who overcame heart surgery and won’t weaponize the office. He’s always been a scrappy guy who can defy expectations, like when he won the GOP primary by fewer than 3,000 votes despite being wildly outspent and unfairly trashed as a marionette (that doesn’t even make sense now.) But Toney grew stronger as a candidate because of his first run. And he’s been able to unify the notoriously fractured conservative base.
Kaul had Tony Evers’ coattails the last two times. No more.
Kaul has never run terribly strong; he defeated Brad Schimel in 2018 by only 17,000 votes and a Constitution Party candidate siphoned away votes, after manufacturing a rape kit crisis that ended in woefully few prosecutions. He defeated Toney by only 35,000 votes in 2022.
Not having a primary is an asset for Toney.
Not really having an opponent is one too. Toney might as well be running against a cardboard cutout of Josh Kaul. There’s a reason some people believe that even if Democrats get their trifecta, Toney might slip through.
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