Chicago’s top internal watchdog is blasting Mayor Brandon Johnson and previous administrations for repeatedly hindering independent investigations into misconduct throughout city government out of fear those probes “may result in embarrassment or political consequences to City leaders.”
In a scathing 14-page letter sent late last week to the head of the City Council’s Ethics Committee, Inspector General Deborah Witzburg said the law departments for Johnson and other mayors selectively impeded investigations by withholding records, slow-walking compliance with inspector general’s office subpoenas and demanding top mayoral lawyers be allowed to attend confidential investigative interviews.
“It is not, and cannot be, within Corporation Counsel’s authority to unilaterally choose which City actors may be meaningfully investigated by (the inspector general’s office),” Witzburg wrote.
Witzburg included several proposed changes to compel city attorneys who serve Johnson to better comply with her office’s investigations.
The head of the ethics committee, Ald. Matt Martin, 47th, called Witzburg’s allegations “deeply concerning” and praised her proposal as a “very good first step based on the problems that she has exhaustively outlined.” He plans to introduce legislation aligned with her letter next week, he told the Tribune.
The issues seem to span “multiple mayoral administrations,” but still must be addressed, Martin said. Witzburg has been inspector general since 2022, when Lori Lightfoot was mayor.
“Whether it’s a low-level employee or the most senior and high-profile employees across city government, everyone should be treated equally,” Martin said. “Those investigations need to move forward swiftly and thoroughly.”
Witzburg told the Tribune that the alleged overreach from the Law Department is “not a new thing.” She said she could not say whether Johnson’s Law Department is more obstructive than the department was under previous administrations, but said ethics need to be improved within city government and that efforts to restrict independent investigations undermine reform. She pointed to the Wednesday conviction of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan as evidence that corruption persists throughout various levels of government.
“No one should look out at the government accountability landscape in Chicago and Illinois right now and think that the status quo is good enough. We cannot continue to do things the way we have always done them and expect different results,” she said.
Witzburg said she has tried to work through the alleged issues with the Law Department staff, but has so far seen little progress.
Responding to the letter, city Law Department spokesperson Kristen Cabanban said that “for the past three decades, previous City inspector generals have properly accepted that the legal rights of City employees and the legal interests of the City rightfully justify our practices.”
“There is both legal precedent through case law as well as procedural juris prudence that dictates how we must conduct ourselves,” Cabanban wrote.
Witzburg wrote in her letter, which was first disclosed by the policy team at the Better Government Association, that the city’s Department of Law regularly asserts an undue and “expansive attorney-client privilege” to avoid complying with inspector general records requests without justifying why. The claim makes Chicago an “outlier on the national landscape,” she added, citing federal law and national standards.
The Law Department’s practices can lead to “severe” delays in investigations, she said in the letter. One request by the inspector general’s office for an unidentified mayor’s text messages took more than a year to be met, in part due to a slow-moving Law Department review, according to the letter.
Under past inspectors general, the Law Department has only demanded to attend investigative interviews three times, Witzburg wrote. But since her April 2022 appointment, at least 10 such demands have been made, she wrote.
The presence of attorneys supervised by the mayor in interviews “inherently chills information sharing,” she wrote. Witzburg’s office has not conducted interviews with the Law Department staff present, and the department’s demands have led numerous interviews to be canceled, she added.
Witzburg’s letter also stated that the city’s Law Department actions have shown it thinks it has discretion over which inspector general subpoenas should be enforced. The Law Department has previously asserted it is entitled to confidential information about ongoing investigations before helping to enforce subpoenas, she wrote.
As part of her proposed changes, Witzburg asked aldermen to change city law to eliminate the Law Department’s discretion over inspector general subpoena enforcement, block city attorneys from sitting in on investigative interviews and prevent the department from asserting attorney-client privilege to avoid sharing records.
The letter follows another inspector general report released late last month that dinged Johnson and past mayors for failing to properly log information about gifts given to top city leaders. In that report, Witzburg alleged Johnson’s team improperly blocked access to the log and the room where mayoral staff said they stored the gift cache.
Johnson released new guidelines for reporting gifts Wednesday after discrediting the investigation. His office also shared a 20-second video of the room and said such a “video log” will be shared quarterly to allow public access.
Witzburg said the mayor’s new guidelines for the so-called gift room are “an improvement.” But the brief video had some “practical challenges,” she added: It would be hard to locate Hugo Boss cufflinks or personalized Mont Blanc pens in such a quick video shot. Both items were among many stored recently in the mayor’s gift room.
The quarterly clip, Witzburg said, is “not a substitute for public access to public property,” which she said is required by law.
“That the Law Department blocked OIG’s access to that information is a symptom of this larger problem,” she said of the gift room report. “When the Law Department exerts privilege of various kinds, that’s what they’re doing: They’re shielding certain activities of city government from oversight, and privileged is not a synonym for unflattering.”
