OIG reveals something shady went on in the mayor's office
A new report has revealed Mayor Brandon Johnson whipped up his secret gift room inside City Hall after he refused to allow Chicago's Office of Inspector General (OIG) have access to the high-dollar freebies he had been given since taking office.
The gifts quietly given to the "progressive" mayor included expensive cufflinks, designer handbags, top-name men’s shoes, and other such high-value items. And it was the OIG's duty to satisfy the city's municipal code requiring "[e]ach department’s premises, equipment, personnel, books, records, and papers shall be made available as soon as practicable to the inspector general."
Johnson has already been criticized for trying to keep the tens of thousands of dollars in free gifts hidden not just from the OIG, but from the people of Chicago. He eventually admitted to his subterfuge and claimed he intends to donate the gifts to charity. But not after he tried to keep them for himself, off the books, and in secret.
Now, the OIG is revealing yet another disgraceful twist in this tale of privilege and greed.
OIG now reports Johnson didn't create his hidden room to store all the gifts until February, which is quite a while after he had already denied the investigators any access to the gifts the investigators are directed by law to record for the sake of transparency.
In fact, the OIG was denied access twice before Johnson finally relented and allowed them to see the items. And one of the ways he tried to wave off criticism was to claim that all the items were safely stored in the gift room he invented out of whole cloth.
The mayor's office tried to pawn off a 21-second video of the items in the room in an attempt to claim Johnson was being "transparent." He also set a schedule for people and the media to see the gifts if they signed up to do so.
The initial report blasted the mayor, saying: “When gifts are changing hands — perhaps literally — in a windowless room in City Hall, there is no opportunity for oversight and public scrutiny of the propriety of such gifts, the identities and intentions of the gift-givers, or what it means for gifts like whiskey, jewelry, handbags, and size 14 men’s shoes to be accepted ‘on behalf of the City.'”
"Time and time again, we have observed that the City of Chicago operates at a deficit of legitimacy with its residents. For generations, government in this City has given people every reason to mistrust things that happen behind closed doors in City Hall," Chicago IG Deborah Witzburg wrote in a statement, according to Fox News. "The Mayor’s Office has taken the position here that it must open those doors to oversight only when it suits them to do so, and that position does little to chip away at mistrust or to pay down the deficit of legitimacy."
The Illinois Policy Institute's Austin Berg ripped Johnson's office for all his shucking and jiving over the whole situation.
“This story is about so much more than just Johnson and these gifts,” Berg wrote. “This entire episode — the unwritten arrangement, the secret logs, the stonewalling from city lawyers — isn’t a fluke. It’s how Chicago operates.”
Johnson's behavior should not be all that surprising. He has been caught lying time and again in his short tenure in the mayor's office.
Johnson, for instance, campaigned on holding the line of property taxes, but it wasn't long before he was demanding a $300 million hike. Fortunately, the City Council refused to bow to that demand. And the OIG has been blasting Johnson for refusing to stick to the rules in a number of areas, especially his refusal to supply needed documents in a timely manner and interfering in investigations.
That isn't even to mention the long list of improprieties by his staffers, including misconduct by former communication director Ronnie Reese and that of senior advisor Jason Lee.
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