Corporation Counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry speaks at a news conference flanked by Mayor Brandon Johnson on Oct. 9, 2024. [Don Vincent/The Daily Line]

Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg’s office sent a scathing memo to the City Council ethics committee last week in which it recommended code changes meant to cease what the inspector described as obstructionist actions by the city’s law department to hinder investigations of the mayor and other top city officials.

The memo, addressed to Committee on Ethics and Government Oversight Chair Matt Martin (47) highlights several alleged practices the Department of Law (DOL) regularly engages in that Witzburg said impairs her office’s investigative work and seeks to shield high-ranking city officials from accountability.

The alleged practices include using an overly broad and improper assertion of attorney-client privilege to deny the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) records, regular demands that city attorneys be allowed to sit in on the OIG’s interviews with top city officials or witnesses to potential misconduct by top officials and selective enforcement of the OIG’s subpoena power.

“The throughline of these concerns is the appearance — and at times reality — that DOL selectively acts in opposition to OIG’s investigative work when OIG’s work may result in embarrassment or political consequences to City leaders,” the memo states.

Martin said he plans to introduce legislation at next week’s City Council meeting to rectify the issues raised by the inspector. He said he hadn’t spoken to the law department or mayor since receiving the memo, which is dated Feb. 7 and was initiated by a through-the-chair request at an ethics committee meeting several weeks ago, where Witzburg first touched on the issues. 

“I think that the problems that she identified are very concerning,” Martin told The Daily Line. “My expectation is that we’ll be able to work collaboratively to find a set of policy solutions that will help address these concerns.” 

Responding to questions about the allegations from The Daily Line, the law department said in a statement: “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 jurisprudence that dictates how we must conduct ourselves.”

The mayor’s office declined further comment. 

The 17-page memo was issued about a week after Witzburg’s office released a report on the mayor’s office’s acceptance of gifts on behalf of the city and a longstanding unwritten agreement that had allowed Chicago mayors for decades to self-police the ethical acceptance of gifts.  

Related: Ethics board recommends end to decades-old ‘unwritten’ practice after OIG report on mayor’s acceptance of expensive gifts  

An inflection point of that investigation was the mayor’s office and law department outright denying OIG investigators immediate access to a gift inventory room on the fifth floor. Instead, DOL asked the OIG to schedule an appointment to inspect the room, and the mayor's office and corporation counsel have disagreed with the inspector over the extent to which city code required cooperation with the OIG by permitting their unannounced access to the room.

“You just can't come to the fifth floor demanding to roam the fifth floor,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said at a press conference last week, claiming that even, “the FBI can't do that.” 

Related: Mayor’s office plans to post gift logs, video of ‘gift room’ publicly

Witzburg’s memo alleges the conflict over gift room access reflects a wider pattern of the law department using its power to hinder specific OIG investigations. 

For instance, the memo alleges DOL regularly delays or denies access to city records the OIG, as a department within the city government, should have access to. 

“Not only have these improper assertions of privilege denied OIG access to highly relevant information across its investigative work, they have also caused extensive delays in OIG investigations, including substantial delays in OIG’s receipt of non-privileged information,” the memo states. 

The law department privileges “nearly every DOL attorney’s communications, as well as many documents related to City business that involved communications with attorneys in other City departments,” leaving the OIG to request manual review of records before some, it alleges, are determined to not be privileged. 

The memo argues that city law entitles the OIG to “full access” of records and that the law department’s invocation of attorney-client privilege is meant to prevent the disclosure of confidential information to third parties, where the risk of civil liability is present, and not from entities within the same organization.  

It’s the same entitlement given to federal inspectors general — having been expressly clarified in a 2016 law after a similar situation played out at the federal level — and a standard identified by the Association of Inspectors General, of which the OIG is a member, according to the memo.  

Additionally, OIG operates under national standards of protecting confidential internal records and disclosing them only when necessary, the memo says. 

“DOL’s withholding from OIG of attorney-client communications has positioned the City as an outlier on the national landscape with respect to inspector general access to government information and records,” the memo says. 

Witzburg also notes that the law department’s representation extends to all city departments, including the OIG itself, and under city code DOL must “furnish written opinions upon subjects submitted” by department leaders. However, Witzburg alleges that when her office sought the corporation counsel’s legal opinion on the decision-making around denying OIG records based on privilege, the law department “expressly declined to provide an opinion.”  

Further, the OIG argues that cooperation and record-sharing actually helps minimize the city’s litigation risk. 

“The City has a legal interest — and its attorneys have a legal duty — in rooting out corruption and misconduct, not simply in pursuing and defending litigation,” the memo states. 

The memo also alleges that DOL attorneys have on at least 10 occasions during Witzburg’s tenure attempted to sit in on OIG interviews, and the office has learned DOL attorneys sat in on interviews at least three times in the past. Witzburg took office in April 2022. 

The practice has led to multiple canceled interviews, Witzburg said, as her office has refused to accommodate DOL’s demands. The practice also conflicts with nationally recognized standards of independence for inspectors general, she said. 

While the OIG conducts plenty of interviews with low-level city workers, such as rank-and-file police officers, laborers and vehicle drivers, the memo alleges that the law department seems to only want to sit in on interviews “involving senior members of the Mayor’s Office, senior mayoral appointees, DOL employees, and individuals involved in matters that may result in embarrassment to City leaders.”  

Even when the OIG or another investigative body is investigating the conduct of employees that aren’t high-ranking but are “the subject of parallel litigation” against the city, such as police misconduct cases, the memo alleges the DOL does not request to sit in on interviews.  

Witzburg said this “selective and persistent interference” at least gives the appearance of the law department trying to protect certain individuals and influence or keep tabs on open, confidential investigations — potentially to help the mayor, to whom the corporation counsel reports.  

“The presence of a City lawyer serving at the pleasure of the Mayor — or their designees — in a confidential investigative interview should be expected to compromise the candor of witnesses and subjects, chill cooperation with OIG investigations, and intimidate complainants and whistleblowers,” Witzburg states in the memo.  

Finally, Witzburg wrote that the OIG’s power to issue subpoenas and work with the law department to file suits to enforce them has been undercut by the DOL. Under city code, OIG attorneys are designated as special assistant corporation counsel to enforce subpoenas, including against former city employees and officials, to maintain the confidentiality of the investigation. The code prohibits DOL from “unreasonably” withholding, delaying or conditioning those requests.  

But Witzburg alleged the law department has previously asked for the identities of people being investigated before allowing OIG attorneys to enforce subpoenas. In those instances, Witzburg said the OIG hasn’t complied.  

“It is not, and cannot be, within Corporation Counsel’s authority to unilaterally choose which City actors may be meaningfully investigated,” Witzburg wrote. 

The inspector added that code changes are “necessary and appropriate to prevent selective decisions to disable certain OIG investigations at the discretion of the Corporation Counsel.”