Paper tigers
Dec 15, 2024
Carol Pope lasted only about two years as the Illinois General Assembly’s inspector general before quitting in frustration.
When Pope, whose job was to investigate allegations of wrongdoing by legislators and their staffers, asked for more autonomy amid a burgeoning corruption scandal in the legislature, lawmakers instead passed a law limiting her powers.
The legislative inspector general “has no real power to effect change or shine a light on ethics violations,” Pope, a former state prosecutor and judge, wrote in a scathing resignation letter in 2021. “The position is essentially a paper tiger.”
In Chicago, aldermen shut down the inspector general’s office charged with overseeing the City Council nearly a decade ago after the first occupant, attorney Faisal Khan, repeatedly butted heads with council members as Khan looked into complaints of misconduct.
Like Pope, Khan viewed the elected officials’ actions as thinly veiled attempts to protect themselves from scrutiny.
“This office wouldn’t be closing if they wanted oversight,” he said at the time.
The frustrations Pope and Khan experienced in being the internal watchdogs for two notoriously crooked government bodies underscore a key factor in Illinois’ pervasive political corruption: Public officials create systems of oversight that often thwart meaningful accountability for elected officials and government employees.
A Tribune review of Illinois and Chicago ethics laws found consistent weaknesses in the systems, including:
Significant restrictions on the types of alleged misconduct the watchdogs are permitted to investigate,
A lack of transparency when wrongdoing is uncovered because of serious limitations on how and when the results of investigations can be made public, and
A limited ability to impose sanctions or discipline on those found to have broken laws or government ethics guidelines, particularly when the subject of an investigation is an elected official.
While a plethora of inspectors general and ethics commissions across Illinois’ various levels of government gives the appearance of robust protections, the shortcomings enable public officials to operate in an atmosphere of impunity, which the Tribune is examining in its ongoing series “Culture of Corruption.”
Chicago still has an overarching inspector general who can conduct independent inquiries into most aspects of city government, including the council. But the office generally cannot name names in its reports, and City Hall can ignore its findings.
Inspectors general and ethics boards must have real power to hold officials accountable for the oversight system to work, Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg told the Tribune.
Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg told the Tribune that inspectors general and ethics boards must have real power to hold officials accountable, as the “false appearance of oversight might be worse than none at all.” (Tess Crowley/Chicago Tribune)
“The false appearance of oversight might be worse than none at all because it sets up one more government institution which people have no reason to trust,” Witzburg said. “This is exactly why the independence of oversight agencies must be so fiercely guarded. Whenever the overseen are able to control oversight, we ought to be worried about whether it is a facade.”
Designed to fail
For decades, Illinois politicians looking to spin themselves out of a scandal have turned to the same playbook: Promise reform while setting up a system that doesn’t solve the problems that caused the scandal in the first place.
Establishing an inspector general’s office is in the playbook’s first chapter.
For example, when Richard M. Daley became mayor in 1989, the city was still reeling from a federal investigation that took down several members of the City Council. Daley proposed an inspector general’s office to investigate wrongdoing in city government, but in approving the position council members excluded themselves from being investigated.
By the time the idea of an aldermanic watchdog was revived in 2010, two decades had passed and a dozen more City Council members had been sentenced to prison. Yet the resulting ordinance placed strict limits on the authority of the new inspector general. Among them: In order to investigate an alderman or members of their staff, the office first had to get the approval of the Chicago Board of Ethics, which in the preceding 23 years hadn’t reported a single case of wrongdoing by an alderman even though more than 20 council members were convicted of crimes during the same period.
Within six years, the council took away the office’s funding and shut it down, while transferring some of its powers to the city inspector general.
The system of oversight at the state level has also had a rocky history.
In 1984, Republican Gov. James Thompson created the state’s first inspector general post and appointed Jeremy Margolis, an acolyte from Thompson’s days in the U.S. attorney’s office. Thompson gave the office wide-ranging powers but did not permit it to investigate lawmakers or public officials.
Rather, the state IG was to focus on overseeing the regulation of businesses such as nursing homes and firms that dispose of toxic waste. Perhaps its most notable effort was investigating a deadly salmonella outbreak tied to tainted milk.
Some observers considered the office’s creation as nothing more than a political move meant to counterbalance the investigative efforts of an attorney general’s office being run by a Thompson rival, Democrat Neil Hartigan. Indeed, when Margolis left to head the Illinois State Police, he took with him oversight of many of the issues he’d dealt with as inspector general and the office went dormant.
It wasn’t the last time an elected official appointed an ally to be a watchdog.
Republican George Ryan installed childhood friend Dean Bauer as inspector general for the secretary of state’s office, which Ryan ran for most of the 1990s.
While Bauer’s job was to police secretary of state employees and root out misconduct, federal prosecutors said he instead buried internal accusations about a licenses-for-bribes scandal out of fear it would be tied to Ryan.
Dean Bauer, center, shown in 2000 with attorney Ed Genson, served as inspector general for the secretary of state’s office under George Ryan, a childhood friend. Prosecutors charged Bauer as part of a licenses-for-bribes scandal that ultimately also led to Ryan’s conviction. (Phil Greer/Chicago Tribune)
Bauer, who pleaded guilty in 2001 to a federal felony count of obstructing justice, ultimately admitted he’d instructed a secretary to destroy documents subpoenaed by federal investigators. One of the documents showed Bauer halted an inquiry into stunning allegations that a fiery 1994 crash in Wisconsin that killed six children from Chicago was caused by a driver linked to the scandal.
The Bauer case and Ryan’s subsequent federal corruption conviction spurred another call for reforms, which was embraced by Ryan’s successor as governor, Democrat Rod Blagojevich.
Blagojevich’s plan included mandating inspectors general for each of the five statewide elected offices — governor, attorney general, secretary of state, comptroller and treasurer — and for the General Assembly. Two new ethics commissions would oversee the IGs’ work: one commission for the five executive branch inspectors general and the other for the legislative branch.
Blagojevich trumpeted the measure as “revolutionary ethics reform.” But again, the system had major flaws.
In 2003, Gov. Rod Blagojevich, left, held a news conference on an ethics reform package. He was introduced by Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, right, who later became governor after Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office. (Chuck Berman/Chicago Tribune)
The watchdogs were prohibited from launching investigations until they received formal complaints. And when they found wrongdoing, the rules generally prohibited them from making those findings public.
That was particularly true for wrongdoing involving lawmakers because a majority vote from an eight-member panel of four Democrats and four Republicans — almost exclusively sitting legislators — was required before reports could be released, a system virtually designed to deadlock.
Hidden findings
A year after the Blagojevich ethics laws took effect, the state’s newly revamped inspector general’s office for the governor’s administration issued a 10-page report titled “A Celebration of Integrity.”
The report provided a variety of statistics about the office’s investigations, how many complaints were filed and the general types of allegations. But nowhere did it detail what actual wrongdoing was found or even what recommendations the office offered to correct the dishonesty.
Defenders said the lack of transparency was meant, in part, to protect people from political retribution and smear campaigns. But even some supporters of the ethics overhaul said obscuring so many details undermined the law’s main goal — to increase public confidence in government.
Then-state Sen. Kirk Dillard, a Hinsdale Republican, summed up the problem: “I can’t tell from the statistics whether someone stole 18 cents or $18 million, although even if it’s a penny, it’s wrong.”
While the secrecy might have protected some innocent state employees from untrue innuendo, it mostly benefited the governor and his administration. And the only way the public could learn details of an inspector general’s findings was if a journalist or some other party managed to obtain a copy of the report.
In 2006, the Tribune pried loose a report that found the Blagojevich administration had “complete and utter contempt” for a law giving military veterans preference in hiring and a court ruling barring political considerations when filling most jobs.
The report, which was revealed shortly after it became public that the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago was looking into “endemic hiring fraud” under Blagojevich, stated the governor’s intergovernmental affairs office was “the real machine driving hiring” at the Illinois Department of Employment Security from nearly the time he took office. The inspector general’s office recommended discipline, “up to and including discharge,” for six employees. But when the Tribune obtained the report nearly two years later, half of those individuals still worked for the department, including one who’d been promoted.
The hiring issues weren’t among the charges filed against Blagojevich when he was arrested almost exactly 16 years ago — charges that eventually sent him to federal prison in 2012. But the findings were listed in the articles of impeachment upon which the Illinois House convicted the governor in early 2009 before the Senate removed him from office.
After Blagojevich became the first person in Illinois to be expelled from the governor’s mansion, calls for reform rang out again.
Blagojevich’s successor, Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, convened a reform commission that suggested numerous changes to strengthen the state’s ethical guardrails. One was to require the release of reports in cases where an inspector general found wrongdoing, including publishing the names of high-level state employees and others found to have engaged in prohibited activity.
The panel also recommended giving the inspectors general power to initiate their own investigations and look into anonymous tips. Additionally, the group said state officials who appoint IGs should have to get state Senate approval before removing them.
Once again, however, the proposals ended up being watered down.
While Quinn signed a law allowing the watchdogs to initiate investigations without receiving a formal complaint and requiring the release of reports that resulted in an employee being fired or suspended for three days or more, he gave the ethics commissions for the executive and legislative branches wide latitude in determining what information could be redacted from the released reports.
Allowing inspectors general to launch their own probes has produced some results. Over the past two years, for example, the inspector general for agencies under the governor has uncovered more than 300 cases in which state employees fraudulently obtained federal loans through the pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program, either by inflating previous earnings of their side businesses or making up the businesses altogether. Many of those employees have been fired or resigned before they could be terminated.
But the law Quinn signed ignored the recommendation to require Senate approval for firing watchdogs, an issue that resurfaced in Springfield a year later when Quinn removed the inspector general he’d inherited from Blagojevich. The move came on the same day Quinn learned the inspector general had dinged the governor’s chief of staff for sending political emails from a government account.
Quinn denied any connection between the two issues.
The Quinn-era changes also did nothing to increase transparency surrounding investigations into alleged wrongdoing by members of the General Assembly.
About a week after the state’s first legislative inspector general, Thomas Homer, left office in 2014, the Tribune published a story based on an unreleased report that blasted Democratic Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and allies for the “timing and persistence” of job requests to Metra.
Madigan himself had asked for the investigation amid fallout from a scandal in which Metra’s ousted CEO publicly accused the speaker of pressuring the commuter rail agency over jobs and raises for political allies — echoing allegations in Madigan’s ongoing bribery and racketeering trial at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
Thomas Homer, shown at a 2013 meeting of the Regional Transportation Authority board, was the state’s first inspector general for the Illinois General Assembly. He left the post the following year. (Nancy Stone/Chicago Tribune)
Although Madigan said the report from Homer showed he hadn’t broken any laws, Homer in the leaked document detailed incidents such as Metra’s chairwoman leaving a meeting in the speaker’s Capitol office with the names of two rail agency employees Madigan wanted to see promoted written on a sticky note.
The speaker “should have realized, given his influential position, that by making the requests at the conclusion of meetings with Metra officials to discuss funding and other legislative issues, he would be creating reciprocal expectations,” Homer wrote.
Chicago has had similar issues with transparency. As a candidate for mayor in 2019, former federal prosecutor Lori Lightfoot promised reforms on how inspector general reports were handled, including making them more transparent.
Under the law at the time, Chicago’s inspector general could release only abridged summaries of cases, with anonymized information about misconduct. Once elected, Lightfoot successfully pushed aldermen to change city law so inspector general reports could be made public.
But instead of leaving the decision on whether to release a full report in the inspector general’s hands, the Lightfoot-backed law gave that power to the mayor’s corporation counsel. What’s more, only reports detailing felonies or deaths were eligible for release.
Under the new law, the Lightfoot administration released IG reports on three controversial incidents that occurred before she became mayor: a report on the police murder of Laquan McDonald, an investigation into the deaths of two cops and a probe into a fatal altercation involving a Daley nephew.
What her administration did not release were any reports from incidents during Lightfoot’s tenure, including a wrongful 2019 police raid on the home of social worker Anjanette Young.
It also did not release a report on a 2020 environmental disaster in the Little Village neighborhood when a developer dusted the Mexican immigrant community with toxic powder during a badly executed implosion.
Lightfoot faced significant pressure from community groups, elected officials and media to release the reports, but her administration said it couldn’t do so under the terms of the city ordinance — terms she had drawn up herself.
Slaps on the wrist
When watchdogs do ferret out misconduct, the consequences for those who break the rules often are insignificant.
In Chicago, a Board of Ethics created in 1987 can fine elected officials and city employees for violations of the city’s ethics code. But the board didn’t issue its first major fine until 30 years later — after the Tribune revealed how corporate executives, campaign contributors and others had lobbied Mayor Rahm Emanuel via his personal email accounts.
The Board of Ethics levied an eye-popping $90,000 fine against a former Uber executive and smaller penalties for others who sought to influence Emanuel. The executive paid his fine, but after an initial wave of headlines the board dropped three fines against two of the mayor’s friends and an alderman’s husband.
The board chairman, William F. Conlon, expressed hesitancy to issue any more heavy fines. The penalties, Conlon said, should not be “unreasonable or vindictive.”
While the ethics board has made some strides in recent years — it has fined the city treasurer and several aldermen for misconduct — it is still considered weak and has caved to demands from powerful figures, including the mayor.
In one key moment during Lightfoot’s tenure, the mayor tried to weaken a newly passed ordinance that banned aldermen from being lobbyists and prohibited elected officials outside the city from lobbying Chicago officials.
Lightfoot’s change would have allowed outside elected officials to lobby in Chicago as long as the public body they represented didn’t have pending or recurring matters involving the city. That would have saved Gyata Kimmons, a trustee in south suburban Flossmoor, from having to choose between his lobbying career and his elected post.
In the meantime, the Chicago Board of Ethics had a choice to make. Would it enforce the law and anger Lightfoot as well as aldermen who supported Kimmons, or wait?
The board bowed to the mayor’s wishes. Executive Director Steve Berlin said at the time that his office wouldn’t enforce the law until Lightfoot’s ordinance was considered. Kimmons continued lobbying City Hall and even emailed Lightfoot directly on behalf of a real estate company that had tenants at O’Hare International Airport. Aldermen later voted down the mayor’s legislation, and Kimmons quit his trustee position to continue lobbying.
In an email to the Tribune, Berlin disputed that the board of ethics “caved” to Lightfoot, saying the board “made a considered decision, as it always does.”
Steve Berlin, executive director of the Chicago Board of Ethics, listens during a meeting at City Hall in 2017. That year, the board fined several people for lobbying violations involving Mayor Rahm Emanuel. (Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune)
The board faced another embarrassing moment this year after it tried to sanction City Hall lobbyists who donated to Mayor Brandon Johnson’s campaign fund. The contributions violated an executive order from 2011 that bans registered lobbyists from making such donations.
The board had to vacate its determination, however, after a lobbyist objected and the mayor’s Law Department hired an outside firm to review the matter. That firm found the ethics board didn’t have the power to enforce the order. Aldermen later voted to make the lobbyist donation ban a city law while also expanding its reach to include mayoral candidates and giving the board enforcement power. But the incident highlighted how loopholes can allow ethics scofflaws to escape punishment.
In the executive branch of state government, the Executive Ethics Commission is tasked with reviewing the outcomes of inspector general investigations and determining whether to levy fines or recommend any other discipline when employees violate certain provisions of state ethics law, such as engaging in political activity on state time.
In the two decades since its creation, the commission has levied more than $565,000 in fines, including a $2,500 penalty against one of its former members in 2013 for attending a prohibited campaign event for a Chicago aldermanic candidate while serving on the commission. But the vast majority of the fines — nearly $480,000 — came in just five cases where former state employees violated a law limiting how quickly they could start new jobs with companies that do business with the state. In those cases, the commission can assess fines up to three times the new job’s annual compensation.
The five state inspectors general can recommend sanctions when they uncover wrongdoing not covered by state ethics law, but they have no enforcement power, leaving the ultimate decision up to top state officials.
Often, employees who break the rules are able to resign or retire before facing punishment. In about half of the roughly 200 cases where the inspector general for agencies under Gov. JB Pritzker found wrongdoing in the state budget year that ended June 30, the employee in question resigned or retired, according to the inspector general’s annual report. Only 32 were fired, and one was suspended.
Even when misdeeds are uncovered at the highest levels of a state agency, the result can be little more than a slap on the wrist.
In a 2021 report, the inspector general found Illinois Department of Transportation Secretary Omer Osman had violated a long-standing policy by allowing high-ranking IDOT officials to delegate job duties so they could avoid triggering a revolving-door prohibition that would have kept them from immediately going to work for state contractors when they left the agency.
Osman, who gave investigators conflicting information, personally approved “blanket recusals” from certain duties for at least three employees who reported to him during his three-decade career at the agency, according to the report, a direct violation of rules designed to prevent corruption by keeping officials from benefiting financially off lucrative state contracts they oversee.
The report — which wasn’t released publicly until a review process was completed last year — recommended the governor’s office “take appropriate action regarding Mr. Osman,” without spelling out what that should be.
The appropriate action, as determined by Pritzker? Clarifying internal policies, then reappointing Osman when the governor won a second term in 2022. Pritzker also signed a series of budget bills that included raises for Osman totaling nearly 19%, increasing his pay to $220,500 per year.
On Tuesday, Pritzker’s office announced Osman was retiring after 35 years at IDOT. Osman is in line for a public pension starting at nearly $114,000 per year, according to an estimate from the State Retirement Systems.
Nothing to see here
Pope, the state legislative inspector general who resigned in frustration, wasn’t the first person to call for more independence for the office.
Homer, who investigated Madigan’s influence on Metra hiring, made a similar push as he left office in 2014. The office subsequently sat vacant for nearly three years until an unaddressed sexual harassment complaint against a state senator led the legislature to appoint former federal prosecutor Julie Porter to fill the role temporarily. After leaving the post in early 2019, Porter penned a blistering Tribune op-ed declaring the legislative oversight system “broken” and calling for greater independence.
During Pope’s tenure, when she discussed the Illinois legislature’s system with other inspectors general at a national conference, “they were all shocked, and none of them had to follow those types of restrictions,” she said in a recent interview.
“The same issues have been brought to the attention of the legislature for over 10 years now, and there’s been no movement,” Pope said. “There’s no appetite for real reform, and … I do understand it, but I don’t approve of it.”
The recent federal corruption investigation that hauled Madigan and several other lawmakers into court did result in some changes, such as giving the inspector general authority to begin investigating complaints without prior approval from the Legislative Ethics Commission. But legislators limited the scope of those investigations to conduct directly related to officials’ public duties — placing personal and political misdeeds out of bounds.
In her resignation letter, Pope pointed out that the change in scope meant the office could no longer investigate issues “such as posting revenge porn on social media” or “failure to pay income taxes on non-legislative income” — both real examples of recent misconduct by members of the General Assembly.
In addition, legislators restored the requirement that the inspector general wait to start investigating an allegation — even one that’s made headlines — until someone files an official complaint. That may never happen if the victim or whistleblower fears retribution or lacks faith in the system.
But the current legislative inspector general, who took over from Pope nearly three years ago, told the Tribune these limitations haven’t been a problem.
“I haven’t found any restrictions. I really haven’t,” said Michael McCuskey, a former chief judge of the U.S. District Court for central Illinois. “What I’m looking for is a good complaint in writing.”
McCuskey, who was initially approved over Republican objections on a near-party-line vote in 2022 but reappointed the following year with only one vote in opposition, said he doesn’t think inspectors general should have unilateral authority to launch investigations in the absence of a complaint, particularly when it comes to issues that federal authorities are better equipped to handle.
“With the IRS, the FBI, the (U.S. attorney’s office for the) Northern District (of Illinois), they don’t want some rogue inspector general getting into their territory,” he said.
Since taking office, McCuskey has met with new lawmakers before they’re sworn in to educate them about the state’s ethics laws and tried to make himself a more visible presence around the Capitol. In his view, turnover in the legislature in recent years has brought in many new members with “a different attitude.”
From 2022 through the end of this September, the office received 96 complaints alleging wrongdoing by lawmakers or legislative staff and referred a dozen more to other investigative bodies, according to quarterly reports to the legislature.
As of Sept. 30, the office had closed 20 of the 21 cases it opened without finding any wrongdoing worthy of referring to the Legislative Ethics Commission or the attorney general’s office.
“I haven’t had one that I thought should be published,” McCuskey said.
Not a single report on misconduct by a lawmaker or staff member has been made public in nearly five years, even as federal prosecutors have brought Madigan to trial and won guilty pleas or convictions in cases against a half-dozen other former lawmakers.
Chicago Tribune’s Ray Long contributed.