Daywatch: Mayor Brandon Johnson explores city-owned grocery store
Good morning, Chicago.
Within the mountain of evidence that last month helped convict former Democratic Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s longtime chief of staff, Tim Mapes, federal prosecutors introduced a single email exchange that ignited a surprising political controversy.
In 2018, as the #MeToo movement was sweeping the nation and the speaker was facing accusations he ran an office for years plagued by sexual harassment, Madigan employed the Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm SKDK for guidance. The speaker met with Anita Dunn, a Democratic PR guru who helped found SKDK and currently advises President Joe Biden, and Madigan paid the firm more than $200,000 through his campaign fund, court documents and state records showed.
At the same time, however, SKDK was working with the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, a women’s advocacy group, to help arrange local public relations support for a former Madigan campaign worker who was the first to call out the mistreatment of women inside Madigan’s state and political organizations.
The former campaign worker, Alaina Hampton, and those who worked with her to battle Madigan over alleged political retaliation in federal court say they had no idea SKDK and Dunn worked with Madigan. And they say they didn’t learn about it until the email was disclosed in Mapes’ perjury-and-obstruction trial last month.
Read the full story from the Tribune’s Ray Long and Jason Meisner.
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