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The [Monday] Papers"Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office was more involved in a $20.5 million school contract with a now-indicted consultant than previously disclosed, public records indicate, but his administration has refused to release hundreds of e-mails that could provide a deeper understanding of how the deal came to be," the Tribune reports. I think when all is said and done with this administration, we're going to find out that Rahm Emanuel's office was more involved with Rahm Emanuel's office than we've been led to believe. Has there ever been an elected official around these parts so quick to take the credit for occurrences to which he only has the slightest tangential relationship and so quick to deflect the blame for that which lay directly upon his shoulders? I think not! Even when Emanuel does "own" something that's gone wrong, he does so with the false magnanimity of an insincere pol whose political calculation has determined that he'll be better perceived by taking responsibility, even if he's not to blame. "Quick, find me something to own!" I can hear him barking at his aides. "I need to look magnanimous today!" He probably commissions polls to find out what he should own and what he should blame on Daley, Springfield, the old ways, gun laws, poor black people's values, teachers or you. Rahm Emanuel is like the cunning political antithesis to the George Costanza who found great success when he did the opposite of everything he'd ever done in his life, which had only brought him failure. In Rahm's case, he succeeds by pretending the opposite of reality. He's a reality-fucker. He fucks with reality. * Back to the Trib: "Emanuel and his aides have maintained that the mayor's office had nothing to do with the contract to provide leadership training for principals that is at the center of a federal bribery indictment against ex-schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett and the consulting firm where she once worked." This is odd to me, because at least one Emanuel aide actually questioned the contract - in a way that no member of the school board we're aware of did. The Sun-Times reported on Friday that Barbara Byrd-Bennett was (faux) livid when the mayor's top education aide questioned the SUPES contract. Does this not reflect at least partially well on the Emanuel administration? To wit: Just before 6:30 p.m. on June 24, 2013, a CPS deputy press secretary asked the district's then-personnel director, Alicia Winckler, and an official in charge of hiring principals for more information about the proposal that was set to come to the Board of Ed. for approval less than 48 hours later. Now, why the mayor's office would seek out the CPS press office for answers - just like us reporter mopes - instead of going directly to the source doesn't make sense to me. I'd joke that maybe they can't get answers out of CPS either, but let's face it, they are CPS. Anyway: According to Miranda, who referred to Byrd-Bennett as B3 - the nickname the mayor used for her - City Hall wanted to know the answers to these questions: Again, it's hard to understand why CPS's media people are involved in this, except to say that Carroll, who would later leave CPS to run Rahm's mayoral Super PAC, was essentially his eyes and ears there. Lisa Schrader, at that time Emanuel's chief of staff, said Friday the questions about SUPES had come from her after schools official presented the agenda for their next board meeting to the mayor's office. So the agenda item raised eyebrows at City Hall (just as it did for Sarah Karp, the Catalyst reporter who broke the story) and they started asking tons of questions - they do understand reporters' jobs! And then Byrd-Bennett did to City Hall what City Hall so often does to us: stonewalled. Now you know how it feels! Angry at being questioned about the $20.5 million, no-bid contract she was about to hand to her former employers at the SUPES Academy, Byrd-Bennett wrote Emanuel aide Beth Swanson: "I cannot be second-guessed like this." Now here's the really interesting part in terms of Rahm's media strategy, which will bring us back to today's Tribune story shortly: CPS officials initially declined to release Byrd-Bennett's June 24, 2013, e-mail to Swanson, citing an exemption in the state's open-records law for correspondence involving "preliminary" deliberations. But in the wake of the indictments, officials said, "CPS believes that the public interest is best served by the release." Of course, that's not how the state's open-records law works, but City Hall (no doubt Rahm himself, personally) figured out that it would make them look good politically to now release an e-mail chain that showed them pushing back against the SUPES contract. Of course, that leaves unanswered the question of why Rahm's school board displayed no such curiosity that we're aware of. In July, Swanson told the Sun-Times she was so concerned about a potential conflict that she raised questions to the school board about the relationship between Byrd-Bennett and Solomon in advance of the SUPES vote. * With all of that in mind, let's return to today's Trib: When asked in April if his administration had any role at all in the SUPES contract, Emanuel told reporters, "No, you obviously know that by all the information available. And so the answer to that is no." What that says to me is that the e-mails released to the Sun-Times were the ones that made the Emanuel administration look as good as they're gonna look in this case - and the rest make them look really, really bad. By early 2013, efforts to expand the program were growing, and e-mails obtained by the Tribune show SUPES' co-owners and CPS officials discussing how to secure more money to broaden the training. Some of those e-mails were exchanged on the same day in May that CPS officials were scheduled to meet with Emanuel. The e-mails often referenced the phrase "CELA," shorthand for the Chicago Executive Leadership Academy, an Emanuel-backed initiative to train school leaders. And, of course: "Neither Emanuel, his aides nor his communications office would answer detailed Tribune questions based on the e-mail and meeting records." * Finally: "A log of e-mails from the mayor's office showed Swanson, the mayor's education point person, sending or receiving SUPES-related messages more than a dozen times during the days before the board vote. "But Swanson's responses were not included in the documents turned over to the Tribune. The mayor's office has declined to release what emails it has in its possession from this chain, stating those emails are covered by an exemption in the state law for 'preliminary drafts, notes, recommendations, memoranda and other records in which opinions are expressed, or policies or actions are formulated.'" And now remember this response from the administration to the Sun-Times from earlier in this column: CPS officials initially declined to release Byrd-Bennett's June 24, 2013, e-mail to Swanson, citing an exemption in the state's open-records law for correspondence involving "preliminary" deliberations. But in the wake of the indictments, officials said, "CPS believes that the public interest is best served by the release." The truth is CPS is being directed by City Hall to best serve the interests of the mayor through a selective releasing of documents that are rightly the property of the public. To Rahm Emanuel, this scandal isn't anything to learn from but simply a political problem to solve. - The Cub Factor: The Truth About Joe Maddon Exclusive! Inside The USS Illinois The Weekend In Chicago Rock - BeachBook Posted by The Beachwood Reporter on Sunday, October 11, 2015 * Posted by The Beachwood Reporter on Sunday, October 11, 2015 * Posted by The Beachwood Reporter on Sunday, October 11, 2015 Posted by The Beachwood Reporter on Sunday, October 11, 2015 * Posted by The Beachwood Reporter on Saturday, October 10, 2015 * Posted by The Beachwood Reporter on Monday, October 12, 2015 - TweetWood
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- The Beachwood Tip Line: Hittin' and runnin'. Posted on October 12, 2015 |
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