Poor Scott Walker. The Wisconsin governor claims he is the victim of a “media frenzy” orchestrated by liberals who released documents in a John Doe investigation alleging he was at the center of a criminal fund-raising scheme. These are “the accusations of partisans within a Democrat district attorney's office” who cannot prove their case, and have therefore sought refuge in “the Court of Public Opinion," Walker wrote last week in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel op-ed.

Walker’s contention that the case is now dead is flat wrong; the investigation targeting him is still under appeal. But the overlooked story here is the role of conservatives in the public chastisement of a rising star in the GOP firmament. The same activists who spent millions to help Walker survive a 2012 recall election strongly supported the release of the Doe documents—which have made the governor’s 2014 reelection less likely, to say nothing of his entering the 2016 Republican presidential primary—because their goals are even bigger than getting Walker elected president.

Sure, the governor is an important figure to these conservatives, but he is small potatoes compared to the legal feast they’ve long savored: overturning the restrictions on so-called “dark money” raised by their independent political advocacy groups. These conservatives are using the investigation against Walker to launch a frontal assault against laws barring electoral candidates from coordinating with third-party advocacy groups (as Walker is accused of doing). They hope to appeal the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has been receptive to challenges of campaign-finance restrictions.

Their key strategist is Eric O’Keefe, a smart, wealthy, tactically sophisticated political activist and longtime associate of the Koch brothers. Their connections go back to at least 1979, when David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket and O’Keefe worked full-time on the Libertarian presidential campaign, rising to national field coordinator and, in 1980, to national director of the party.

O’Keefe is independently wealthy and has worked for decades as a political activist crusading against the power of political incumbency, in favor of term limits and against the post-Watergate campaign-finance law, whose “actual intent ... was to handicap challengers and therefore entrench incumbents,” he has written. David Koch felt the same way: The law “makes my blood boil,” he wrote in a letter to Libertarian Party members. O’Keefe went on to join, fund, and often found a long list of interconnected political organizations, many also connected to the Koch brothers, including the Center for Competitive Politics, one of the leading right-wing groups fighting against limits on money in politics.