Bob Donovan In Trouble Again

Bob Donovan. File photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Last week we learned about Republican State Rep. Bob Donovan‘s “shady scam… to literally help pay his rent,”  as the liberal group A Better Wisconsin Together described it. A story by Dan Bice reported that Donovan’s campaign finance reports showed he paid himself $850 every month after renting an apartment in the state Assembly district he represents while also maintaining a home outside of the district.

A month after his reelection last November, Donovan began paying himself $850 a month from his campaign account for “staff lodging” at his old house. “In all, he paid himself $5,950 in the seven months after the election,” the story reported.

Donovan did not respond to requests from Bice to comment on this, but soon tried to cover his tracks: the legislator revised his campaign finance report and deleted the reported payments to himself, except for the $850 payment in December of 2024, the story reported.

However, his attempt at a cover-up looks fishy, as A Better Wisconsin found: after Donovan deleted the cash payments, the total cash-on-hand balance in his campaign remains the same and did not increase by the more than $5,000 in payments for staff lodging that were supposedly cancelled. And since Donovan has declined to discuss this, there is no way to know precisely what’s going on.

This is not the first time Donovan, who served for many decades as Milwaukee alderman before being elected to the state Legislature, has been involved in a scam of this sort.

Back in 2002 I wrote a piece for Milwaukee Magazine reporting that Donovan had used his position as alderman to help get $50,000 in foundation grants to create the Milwaukee Alliance, whose initial mission was to connect community groups, churches and businesses in his district to the city. That is, by definition, what an alderman is paid to do anyway. So why was Donovan using foundation money to create this group, and why was the Alliance in turn paying for the heat and electricity for the neighborhood alderman’s office that Donovan maintained? 

More troubling questions were later raised by Journal Sentinel reporter Georgia Pabst, who reported that Donovan had pushed to get a federal grant for the Milwaukee Alliance, though he was its non-paid president and chairman, and his grown stepdaughter was a part-time employee of the Alliance for four months. By the time this was reported, Donovan had resigned as president and chairman and moved his aldermanic office out of the building, in response to conflict-of-interest concerns raised by federal officials.

Stephen Biskupic, then serving as the U.S. Attorney for Milwaukee, investigated Donovan and found that the alderman’s wife Kathy Donovan had received nine checks of $300 each from the Alliance, that there was a blurring of interests between the Alliance and Donovan’s campaign fund, and that records regarding payments to his wife were falsified.

In December 2005, Donovan paid a fine under a settlement that Biskupic described as a “middle ground” agreement akin to a misdemeanor charge, while Donovan insisted the agreement proved his innocence. 

But Donovan had agreed to “a compromise of the pending charge,” as the agreement he signed was described. Just as a felony can be reduced to a misdemeanor, Donovan’s misdemeanor charge (of fraud) was reduced to a non-criminal penalty, as Biskupic made clear at the time. If Donovan was completely innocent, why did he agree to several penalties? These included the following: 

-Donovan agreed to pay the City of Milwaukee $2,500 “as a penalty for failure to provide appropriate oversight for the activities of Milwaukee Alliance”;

-Donovan agreed to henceforth provide no funds for the Milwaukee Alliance, refrain from supporting funding for the group and prohibit any aide from assisting the group;

-Donovan agreed that for two years he would take no role in the operation of a non-profit receiving federal funds; 

-Donovan acknowledged that if he engaged in any criminal activity or failed to appear for any required court appearance, the agreement with the U.S. Attorney would be null and void. 

Yet when Donovan run (unsuccessfully) for mayor in 2022, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did a story saying the charges against him were dropped by Biskupic.

To reinforce the idea that Donovan won the case, the story quoted him saying “I’m not ashamed to say I did a lot of praying,” and added that “To this day, he wears a Saint Jude lapel pin, the patron saint of lost causes.”

Now Donovan is engaged in another attempt to cover up a similar case of financial corruption. And like last time he will probably hang tight and hope the whole thing gets forgotten.