It was a front page story in the New York Times: "Wisconsin Governor at Center of a Vast Fund-Raising Case." Walker's hometown paper the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel chimed in, "John Doe prosecutors allege Scott Walker at center of 'criminal scheme.'

Liberal pundits all over the web were falling all over themselves trying to make the case that the Wisconsin governor was finished as  potential 2016 candidate and that it was doubtful if he would even finish his term of office. "How much trouble is Scott Walker in," asked the Cap Times of Madison, WI.

Why, none. None at all:

A Wisconsin special prosecutor clarified Thursday that GOP Gov. Scott Walker was not the target of his investigation into what he described in earlier court papers as a “criminal scheme.”

Francis Schmitz, who is being accused of prosecutorial misconduct by one of the conservative groups he subpoenaed, had his own lawyer put out a statement saying that he “has made no conclusions as to whether there is sufficient evidence to charge anyone with a crime.”

A U.S. district judge halted Schmitz’s John Doe investigation last month, a ruling now being reviewed by the Seventh Circuit in Chicago. Last week, the appellate judge unsealed the legal back-and-forth — including Schmitz’s plea to move forward with his inquiry.

“At the time the investigation was halted, Governor Walker was not a target of the investigation,” Schmitz lawyer Randall Crocker wrote in a one-page statement. “At no time has he been served with a subpoena.”

The declaration came just hours after Mary Burke, the Democrat challenging Walker in this fall’s gubernatorial election, launched an attack ad to highlight the media coverage of the “criminal scheme” news and other bad economic reports.

“Scott Walker just isn’t working for you,” a narrator says.

Walker’s campaign responded with a call on Burke to take down the ad and an attack on the media for what it sees as last week’s pile-on.

“Mary Burke’s ad is slanderous at best, and it should [be] pulled from the airwaves immediately,” said Walker campaign manager Stephan Thompson. “Failure to remove this ad would be dishonest and misleading to Wisconsin voters by furthering baseless allegations and inaccurate reporting.”

It was a remarkable effort to smear Walker with outright lies - brazen untruths for which no correction will be made in any publication that ran the bogus story. In fact, so many got it so wrong you have to wonder about some kind of coordination like with Journolist, or whatever the liberal media network morphed into when it was exposed a few years ago.

I recall former labor secretary Ray Donovan being prosecuted for political reasons and, after being acquitted, asked the press, "Where do I go to get my reputation back"?

Walker would ask the same thing except he knows it's even less likely today to get corrections and retractions from liberal media.