Ethics charge against former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot over political emails to workers dismissed

CHICAGO — The Chicago Board of Ethics found insufficient evidence Monday to prove former Mayor Lori Lightfoot violated the city’s ethics code when her campaign sent scores of emails to public employees during her bid for reelection.

Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg accused Lightfoot of violating the city’s ethics code when her campaign sent fundraising emails to public workers. Earlier this year, the Board of Ethics found probable cause that a violation occurred but after meeting with Lightfoot attorney Michael Dorf they dismissed the charges due to insufficient evidence.

In a statement, Dorf said there was “abundant evidence that neither Mayor Lightfoot nor anyone at her campaign intentionally targeted government email addresses for fundraising appeals.”

“The Lightfoot campaign conducted thorough due diligence to ensure that those who subscribed to fundraising solicitations did not use government email addresses. Mayor Lightfoot, like most major candidates involved in large-scale campaigns, was never involved in personally monitoring email list subscribers, or in any other facet of email fundraising,” Dorf said. “By rejecting the investigation and findings of the Inspector General, the Board has avoided setting a dangerous precedent.”

The ethics board did not immediately have a comment.

While the IG and ethics board have not named Lightfoot in the case, the former mayor has acknowledged the matter involves her campaign.

The ethics board ruling gives Lightfoot a victory after months of controversy. Lightfoot’s team solicited teachers to give students extra credit for political work on her campaign, a scandal first reported by WTTW.

Later, WBEZ and the Sun-Times reported her campaign sent thousands of campaign solicitations to public employees’ email addresses, while the Tribune reported Lightfoot was told to stop sending electioneering materials to city workers nearly a year before her staff tried to recruit Chicago Public Schools students to do political work for extra credit.

Witzburg issued a report earlier this year faulting the Lightfoot campaign without naming Lightfoot.

“OIG obtained political campaign emails sent by the official’s political campaign which demonstrated that the official misused their City title in pursuit of a political purpose, as well as misused the authority of their office and City email addresses for a political purpose,” Witzburg wrote earlier this year. “The political campaign emails also demonstrated that the official improperly solicited political donations from City employees, over whom the official had supervisory authority.”

When the campaign-related emails to teachers came to light in January, Lightfoot’s camp first defended but then quickly denounced the practice of sending emails to public workers soliciting campaign help. But an email sent directly to Lightfoot from Witzburg in March 2022 warned her to cease sending political communications to public employee email addresses.

In the email, released by the mayor’s office in response to a request seeking Lightfoot’s January email communications, Witzburg stated that the Board of Ethics had sent a letter via certified mail to Lightfoot’s campaign as well as hand-delivering a copy to Lightfoot’s City Hall office.

“In that letter,” she wrote, “BOE advised that your campaign immediately cease sending electioneering communications to city of Chicago employees at their city email addresses and purge such email addresses from campaign email lists.”

Despite the warning, Witzburg wrote, the inspector general had accumulated evidence “that this practice has continued at a significant scale for months after BOE’s March 2022 letter, with your campaign continuing to send electioneering emails to city employees at their city email addresses, as well as to sister agencies’ employees.”

But Lightfoot officials have long pushed back, arguing that the former mayor did not personally run the email account and her team worked to clear it of public email addresses.

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