Republican attorney general candidate Eric Toney is slamming Democrat Attorney General Josh Kaul after federal inspectors found Kaul’s Department of Justice approved taxpayer-funded reimbursements to a Madison activist group without properly reviewing the bills.
The criticism follows a new audit from the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General examining federal crime-victim funds awarded through Wisconsin DOJ to Freedom Inc., a Madison-based social justice organization that has advocated defunding and abolishing police and was most recently involved in the nearly two-week occupation of Madison’s Williamson Street following the officer-involved shooting of Corey Ruiz.
“A radical group that wants to abolish the police just fleeced Wisconsin taxpayers — Josh Kaul failed yet again,” Toney said. “We need accountability at the WI DOJ.”
Eric Toney, Republican candidate for Attorney General
Federal auditors questioned $46,439 in costs and issued seven recommendations after finding problems with how the grant was administered.
Among the problems: Wisconsin DOJ acknowledged it had not obtained and reviewed invoices before approving reimbursement requests from Freedom Inc. Auditors said that had the agency followed its own invoice-review procedures, it could have identified discrepancies in the group’s billing.
The organization disputed recommendations that it repay certain unsupported expenses and said it would attempt to provide additional documentation. But Toney argues the findings are part of a larger pattern under Kaul.
In 2021, the federal government designated Wisconsin DOJ a “high risk” grantee after the department failed to resolve previous federal audit findings involving its Office of Crime Victim Services. According to Toney’s campaign, federal auditors had initially raised those concerns in 2019, but the problems remained unresolved more than a year later despite additional time to provide documentation.
And Freedom Inc. is hardly a new recipient of taxpayer money.
A 2020 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found the organization had received roughly $3.6 million in state-administered grants and contracts over the previous five years. During Kaul’s first year and a half as attorney general, his DOJ awarded Freedom Inc. $876,674.
Kaul’s office defended those grants at the time, saying the money was supporting services for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Six years later, federal auditors are now questioning how Kaul’s DOJ monitored another round of victim-services funding flowing to the organization.
Toney, the Fond du Lac County district attorney challenging Kaul in November, is making the audit part of a broader case against Kaul’s management of the agency.
“Our crime labs are chronically delayed, northern Wisconsin has gone from four DOJ narcotics agents to zero, and fentanyl has flooded into our communities,” Toney said. “Wisconsin cannot afford a third term for Josh Kaul.”
Toney also pointed to an unreleased DOJ report on missing and murdered Indigenous women and a Legislative Audit Bureau review that found turnaround times had increased for several types of crime-lab testing despite declining submissions and increased staffing. Those are separate issues from the Freedom Inc. audit, but Toney says they demonstrate a broader failure of leadership at the agency.
For Toney, the Freedom Inc. audit provides a straightforward line of attack: Kaul’s DOJ continued sending crime-victim dollars to a group that has called for abolishing police — and federal auditors now say the department wasn’t properly checking the bills before taxpayer money went out the door.
