Marathon Pundit: ILL-inois: First federal subpoena issued in Quinn slush fund scandal

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

ILL-inois: First federal subpoena issued in Quinn slush fund scandal

The Chicago Sun-Times tells us that the subpoena has been issued in the Pat Quinn slush fund scandal.

Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown's husband has been hit with a federal subpoena asking him to appear before a grand jury as part of an investigation into a state anti-violence program.

A source with knowledge of the investigation told the Chicago Sun-Times that the subpoena from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Springfield is directed at Benton Cook III.

It’s a sign that federal authorities, who already have requested documents from two state agencies regarding Gov. Pat Quinn’s troubled Neighborhood Recovery Initiative, are taking a closer look at Cook's role in receiving grant money from the program.

Brown of course is a Chicago Democrat, just as Quinn is.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune took the phony reformer apart in an op-ed today:

[T]oday the public's trust in Quinn is strained as never before. Federal and Cook County prosecutors are exploring a botched anti-violence program on which Quinn spent $54.5 million. The bipartisan Legislative Audit Commission has voted 10-1 to seek subpoena powers to investigate how that money was doled out. Separately, Chicago attorney Michael Shakman alleges in federal court that Quinn's Department of Transportation broke anti-patronage rules to put political cronies in state jobs.

…

His announcement on Oct. 6, 2010, of his anti-violence effort, the Neighborhood Recovery Initiative, from the get-go was easy to characterize as a get-out-the-vote effort, funded by taxpayers. A February 2014 report of doorstop heft from Illinois Auditor General William Holland documents how the program was hastily implemented during the final month of Quinn's election campaign, with no documentation of how community groups were chosen to receive money; with the state letting Chicago aldermen select lead agencies; with seven of Chicago's 20 most violent communities excluded; with faulty financial controls; with inadequate monitoring of recipient groups' expenses; and, most remarkably, with "No evaluation completed relative to impact of State NRI funds on violence rates."

In sum: Quinn, a Democrat, awarded state dollars in areas that tend to produce big pluralities of Democratic votes. Protection for taxpayers? Negligible.

…

After Quinn's slim victory, payments began rolling out to NRI recipients. And while he has said he learned of NRI's problems in June 2012 and shut it down, legislative Republicans had squawked during appropriation hearings in early 2011 that NRI looked like a political slush fund. Similar complaints surfaced early in 2012, this time with Latino Democrats peeved that with so much of the money going to African-American neighborhoods, their districts were short-changed.