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Madison— Friday evening, the Wisconsin Supreme Court allowed three district attorneys to go to the U.S. Supreme Court over a secret closed investigation into Gov. Scott Walker's campaign and conservative groups.

But the state Supreme Court denied the prosecutors help from a national law firm that had won a similar case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 4-1 unsigned decision, the state's high court found that Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm and two other Democratic district attorneys, Ismael Ozanne of Dane County and Larry Nelson of Iowa County, cannot share sealed documents with three outside counsels.

The three private attorneys in question work for the firm Reed Smith LLP, which handled the U.S. Supreme Court case Caperton vs. A.T. Massey Coal Co.

That decision dealt with whether state supreme court justices could sit on cases involving major political benefactors.

A similar issue is at play in Wisconsin. The appeal attempt to the U.S. Supreme Court by the district attorneys is likely to hinge on whether Justices Michael Gableman and David Prosser should have ruled on the investigation because their campaigns benefited from heavy spending by groups that were caught up in the probe.

The Reed Smith attorneys had been willing to represent the prosecutors for free.

This latest order follows a recent action by the Wisconsin Supreme Court declining to reconsider an earlier ruling ending the investigation.

Special prosecutor Francis Schmitz, who hoped to see the nation's high court take the case, had made that request for reconsideration last year.

The state Supreme Court rejected that and clarified that going forward only district attorneys also involved in the so-called John Doe probe could work on the case.

The district attorneys had sought permission for the Reed Smith attorneys to review sealed documents for the purposes of helping to make the appeal.