Wisconsin taxpayers to pay $30,000 to settle lawsuit after Rep. Dale Kooyenga took a protester's sign

MADISON - Wisconsin taxpayers will spend $30,000 to settle a lawsuit brought against state Rep. Dale Kooyenga after he removed a protest sign critical of Republicans from a public area of the Capitol.

Kooyenga, a Brookfield Republican now running for the state Senate, said in a statement he signed off on the settlement because he did not want to “incur the costs of a prolonged legal battle, or further divert time or energy from the actual public policy priorities facing our state.”

Lester Pines, the attorney who brought the lawsuit on behalf of the man whose sign was taken, said he welcomed how the lawsuit was resolved.

"We are pleased with the settlement because it is an acknowledgement by Rep. Kooyenga that he violated the Eighth Commandment — thou shalt not steal," Pines said.

In May, Donald Johnson of Madison placed a sign in the Capitol that criticized Republican President Donald Trump, without naming him, as "corrupt" and "a serial groper." It said Republicans backed the president, "we the people be damned."

Johnson had a state permit to display the sign in the Capitol, and he said he taped a copy of it to the back of the sign.

That month, Kooyenga removed the sign and put it in his office because he thought it was inappropriate. After Johnson complained about the missing sign, the Capitol Police saw on security video that Kooyenga had taken the sign and recovered it from him.

Gov. Scott Walker’s administration has declined to release a copy of the video of Kooyenga taking the sign to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other media outlets.

In the lawsuit, the two sides reached an agreement that the video would not be made public because of the administration's concerns that doing so could reveal the location of hidden cameras in the Capitol. Pines said he reached the settlement before seeing the video and believed the state should have to release the video under the state's open records law.

"The idea it interferes with the security of the Capitol is really quite preposterous," Pines said.

A final settlement has not been filed with the federal court in Madison, but Pines and state Department of Justice spokesman Johnny Koremenos said attorneys had agreed to pay $30,000 to settle the matter.