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Scott Walker’s Milwaukee County staff had a code name for his gubernatorial campaign with which they secretly coordinated strategy and messaging nearly every day: “the dark side.”

The winking reference appears several times in emails that are among some 227,000 pages of records released Tuesday by Milwaukee County. The records, from 2009 and 2010, are among hundreds of thousands of documents seized by prosecutors in the John Doe investigation into Walker’s county executive office before he became governor and are now being released at the request of various media.

It was the fifth release of records related to that investigation, which closed in 2013. The probe resulted in charges and fines against six former employees and associates of Walker — including two for campaigning on county time. Walker was not charged.

Most of the correspondence involves routine county business, but many of the messages were sent using private email accounts.