Indiana Prosecutor Resigns After Suggesting Fake Attack on Walker, Blame Protesters

by Mike Hall, Mar 24, 2011

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In an e-mail praising Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) attack on worker rights and middle-class jobs, an Indiana deputy prosecutor suggested a fake attack on Walker to discredit the workers and their unions protesting the governor’s actions.
Yesterday, just before the story was scheduled for publication, Carlos Lam, a Johnson County deputy prosecutor, submitted his resignation, reports the Daily Journal in Franklin, Ind.
In the e-mail from Lam to Walker, discovered by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Center Journalism following an open records request, Lam suggests that Walker employ a “false flag operation” to gain sympathy and paint the protesters as violent.

If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions’ cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions….Currently, the media is painting the union protest as a democratic….Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions. God bless, Carlos F. Lam.

Lam told the journalism center that his e-mail address matched the Hotmail address appearing on the Walker e-mail but claimed he had never written to Walker. But according to the center:

At 5 a.m. Thursday, expecting the story to come out that day, Lam called his boss, Johnson County, Ind., Prosecutor Brad Cooper, and told him he had been up all night thinking about it.

“He wanted to come clean, I guess, and said he is the one who sent that email,” Cooper said.

A spokesman for Walker says no one in the governor’s office had seen the e-mail or contacted Lam.
In February, a caller pretending to be right-wing billionaire and Walker campaign donor David Koch got through to the governor and suggested he plant troublemakers in the crowd to incite violence that could be blamed on the protesters. Walker admitted, “We thought about that.”
Click here for the center’s full story.
Lam is the second Indiana prosecutor to lose his job for suggesting Walker use violence. In February, Deputy Attorney General Jeff Cox was fired after a tweet he sent that said  “live ammunition” and “deadly force” should be used to disperse protesters in Madison was discovered.