Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel (second from left) stand next to Chippewa County Sheriff Travis Hakes (second from right), who has been at the center of numerous controversies. (Screenshot)

In a television ad and recent endorsements, Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel has touted the support of Chippewa County Sheriff Travis Hakes — a controversial figure whose county board voted 19-1 last year to find it had “no confidence” in him after he was accused of sexually harassing a female job applicant and subordinate.

As the race between Shimel and his opponent, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford, heats up, the two candidates have attempted to claim the other is soft on crime. Schimel, a Waukesha County Circuit Court judge who was previously the state attorney general under Republican Gov. Scott Walker, has in recent days announced endorsements from a number of current and retired sheriffs from across the state. 

Hakes is one of the sheriffs who endorsed Schimel and appeared with the judge in a television ad behind a graphic that states Schimel is “tough on crime.” 

Last February, the Chippewa County Board voted nearly unanimously that it has “no confidence in Chippewa County Sheriff Travis Hakes’ continued leadership” and that the sheriff has “a long history of not being credible.”

An independent investigation into Hakes initiated by the board found that he had sent inappropriate messages to a female job applicant and a subordinate, including a text that shared a “racist ethnically charged meme.” 

“For any leader of a law enforcement agency to make such comments calls into question their professional judgement and ability to enforce the law and treat all persons fairly and lawfully,” a joint statement from County Administrator Randy Scholz and Board Chair Dean Gullickson said. “Moreover, for any leader of a law enforcement agency to suggest that his subordinates engage in such conduct with his implied support and tolerance leaves no doubt as to his inability to effectively manage any law enforcement employee and not expose the County to great risk.”

In the texts, Hakes told a female subordinate that she was the “breast person for the job!” in a conversation about birds and then later sent a meme depicting an Asian man crying with the caption “when the chow mein was on point but you kinda miss your cat.”

Hakes’ term as sheriff runs through 2026 and the board has no ability to remove him from office, which led to the no confidence vote. But in December 2023, the Chippewa County District Attorney put Hakes on the county’s Brady list — a document prosecutors are required to send to defense attorneys naming law enforcement officers “who have had incidents of untruthfulness, criminal convictions, candor issues, or some other type of issue placing their credibility into question.”

Hakes has “misled the public and County Board” multiple times about his work history, according to the board’s statement. 

Because of his inclusion on the Brady list, Hakes is unable to be actively involved in investigations or handle physical evidence. 

Several other sheriffs who have endorsed Schimel have also sparked controversy during their tenures. 

Polk County Sheriff Brent Waak drew attention in 2023 for refusing to enforce a rule from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that banned the use of stabilizing braces on pistols. Waak has previously shared his belief in the constitutional sheriff ideology — which states that county sheriffs have nearly unlimited authority to decide what the law is. 

Schimel was also endorsed by Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling, who drew the praise of election deniers after he called for the arrest of five members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and declined to arrest an election denier who had requested absentee ballots on behalf of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Racine Mayor Cory Mason. 

In his 2018 campaign for attorney general, Schimel ran an ad touting his law enforcement support that included the endorsement of former Taylor County Sheriff Bruce Daniels — who was investigated by the FBI for hacking into a subordinate’s Dropbox account and by the state Department of Justice for pressuring another agency to destroy a report on a traffic accident that involved his son. 

Wisconsin Democratic Party spokesperson Haley McCoy said in a statement that Schimel touting Hakes’ support shows a lack of judgement. 

“This isn’t the first time that Brad Schimel has struggled with a photo op, but standing with a man censured 19-1 by local elected officials and accused of sexual harassment, conflicts of interest, poor leadership, and violating his oath is a new low — even for an extreme politician like Schimel,” McCoy said. “Brad Schimel has a long record of failing to keep Wisconsinites safe, from giving light sentences to convicted domestic abusers to failing to test more than 6,000 sexual assault kits over two years. It’s clear as day that Wisconsin voters can’t trust Brad Schimel’s judgment or public safety record on the state Supreme Court since he can’t even get this easy call right.”

Schimel’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Thousands of former President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building following a “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to pardon the Jan. 6 rioters imprisoned for their role in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, one of the candidates running for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court joined the campaign to rewrite the history of what happened that day, glossing over the offenses of the Jan. 6 defendants.

Speaking with right-wing radio host Vicki McKenna on her iHeart Radio podcast on Thursday, former Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, who is running in the April election for a seat on the state’s highest court, complained that the Jan. 6 defendants never got “a fair shot” in court and accused Democrats of “abusing the court system” for “political gain.”

McKenna and Schimel agreed that Democrats are guilty of “lawfare” — political warfare via the courts. But it was Schimel who specifically brought up Jan. 6.

“Another piece of the lawfare manipulation is that they utilize jurisdictions that are overwhelmingly to the left in terms of the voters — which means the jurors that you’re going to draw to hear these cases,” Schimel said. In Trump’s New York hush money trial, for example, he said, “there was no way any jury was going to rule anything other than he’s guilty of whatever you can give him, whatever charge you give them.”

“The same thing for these January 6th defendants who were all prosecuted in the Washington, D.C., district, which is overwhelmingly liberal,” Shimel continued. “This part of the manipulation is to go to districts like that. They would never take you, they would never take their prosecution in a district where you had a fair shot as a defendant.”

Republicans across the country have hopped on the bandwagon to “flip the script” on Jan. 6, as The New York Times reports in a long article detailing how Trump and his supporters “laundered the history of Jan. 6, turning a political nightmare into a political asset.” Two weeks from now, the piece points out, Trump will take the oath of office on the very spot where his followers stormed the Capitol, kicked and stomped a police officer, beat another officer with an American flag pole and broke into the building vowing to attack and kill the officials who were there to certify the election Trump lost.

After a brief period during which Republican lawmakers who hid under their desks during the attack emerged to denounce the desecration of the Capitol and the Big Lie about a stolen election, Trump made his comeback, campaigning on the idea that Jan. 6 rioters were martyrs, and former Republican critics began to change their tune.

Still, Schimel’s comments stand out. For a Supreme Court candidate to suggest that jury trials don’t work and that the whole U.S. system of justice is so politicized it can’t be trusted is deeply undermining of the very institution Schimel proposes to join.

During the McKenna show, both McKenna and Schimel engaged in some familiar partisan liberal-bashing, casting aspersions on Dane County and suggesting that the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decisions allowing absentee ballot drop boxes to be used again and declaring the Republicans’ egregiously gerrymandered voting maps unconstitutional were merely political, not serious constitutional decisions.

Both implied that courts dominated by conservative justices are fair and impartial and that only Democrats and liberals politicize the process.

That’s pretty rich coming from Schimel who, as former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s attorney general, was involved in a Christian conservative coalition’s plan to end federally protected abortion rights.

Schimel made government transparency a major talking point in his campaign to be the state’s top lawyer, but then tried to hide records of his trip to a conference hosted by the controversial Alliance Defending Freedom, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled an anti-gay hate group. Schimel was there with his colleague at the state Department of Justice, attorney Micah Tseytlin, who, according to The New York Times, presented “his legal strategy to end Roe. … He proposed his idea for an abortion ban that set a limit earlier than 20 weeks to undercut Roe more openly.”

Schimel told McKenna that, unlike liberal justices on the court, “I’m going to follow the law and the Constitution. That’s something we’re missing right now.”

He criticized the Court’s liberal majority not just for their decisions but also for the cases they haven’t decided yet on the anti-union Act 10 law and on whether abortion is legal in Wisconsin. “They don’t want this issue to be resolved. They want to keep dragging it out. And that’s, that is playing political games with these cases,” he said.

It’s pretty obvious from Schimel’s political background that he is hardly the impartial, nonpartisan figure he claims to be. His insistence that the Jan. 6 defendants couldn’t get fair treatment in a Washington, D.C., courtroom is a big clue. In our increasingly toxic political atmosphere, it’s easy to forget that there are other kinds of judges, who listen to the evidence and make clear-eyed decisions based on the law, not partisanship.

Take the Washington-based federal judge who heard the case of Philip Sean Grillo, who bragged about storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. Judge Royce C. Lamberth, the Times reported, rejected Grillo’s request for a delay of sentencing on the grounds that he was about to be pardoned by Trump. Lamberth filed a court document reminding everyone of the gravity and the violence of the Capitol attack. He and his colleagues on the D.C. Circuit had presided over hundreds of trials, heard from witnesses, read hundreds of documents and watched thousands of hours of disturbing video footage.

“They told the world that the election was stolen, a claim for which no evidence ever emerged,” Lamberth wrote of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. “They told the world that they were there to put a stop to the transfer of power, even if that meant ransacking, emptying, and desecrating our country’s most hallowed sites. Most disturbingly, they told the world that particular elected officials who were present at the Capitol that day had to be removed, hurt, or even killed.”

Lamberth’s sober judgment, and his biography, undermine Schimel’s claims about D.C. courts stacked with liberals who made a partisan target of the Jan. 6 defendants. Lamberth was appointed to the court in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan.