In the run-up to the Scott Walker recall election in Wisconsin last year, the Democratic Party there was aggressively pushing the claim that the Republican governor was on the verge of getting an indictment as part of a probe into improprieties by some of his former staffers. When I was reporting on the race for my former employer, a state Democratic Party spokesman told me flat-out that a Walker indictment was imminent.

It was a cynical partisan effort to smear the  governor, who was then leading in the polls. (Indeed, Walker would go on to win the recall by a larger margin than he won election in the first place.) I didn’t report on the Democratic Party official’s claim because I was wary of repeating accusations by an interested party that I could not prove one way or the other. It wasn’t like the investigators were going to share their information with me.