Ex-Watchdog Can't Absolve Rahm Emanuel From Laquan "Cover-Up" Now

CHICAGO — Former City Hall independent watchdog Joe Ferguson has injected himself into the pending U.S. Senate confirmation vote on Rahm Emanuel's appointment as America's ambassador to Japan.

For some reason, Ferguson felt compelled to clarify what the findings of his investigation into the murder of Laquan McDonald did not reveal.

In a letter to the Senate foreign relations committee, he wrote that widespread public opinion that either Emanuel himself or his administration was involved in a suspected "cover-up" of video showing Laquan's death are "not grounded in fact, because the facts do not exist."

Ferguson says he knows this to be true because he was charged with investigating the aftermath of the night in 2014 officer Jason Van Dyke fired every bullet in his gun — 16 shots — until the Black teenager was dead.

"My office’s comprehensive investigation did not reveal any evidence that would support the lingering surmises and accusations of a 'cover-up' orchestrated out of City Hall. None," Ferguson wrote.

What Ferguson's investigation did find was much worse.

In the letter, the former watchdog explained City Hall "decisions made about the non- or delayed- disclosure of the body-worn camera videos at that time were in fact the longstanding policy and practice of the City of Chicago and its Law Department."

Did Emanuel's administration use those longstanding policies and practices to conceal, suppress, hide — or any other synonym for "cover-up" — video of Laquan's murder from the public?

Yes. That's exactly what happened.

Requests for public information were denied due to the "ongoing investigation" at a time when Emanuel happened to be engaged in a hotly contested re-election campaign.

City attorney Steve Patton quickly negotiated a deal to pay Laquan's family $5 million without the need for filing a headline-making wrongful-death lawsuit.

Emanuel's rubber-stamp City Council didn't ask tough questions of Patton before approving the payout, which included a provision to keep video of Laquan's murder quiet.

"They had every reason to expect it would work," independent journalist Jamie Kalven, told me.

"If not for whistleblowers … it works. And it works in that kind of terrible way where no one is really responsible. There are just all these different actors doing what they always do. A kind of bureaucratic evil. I think that's how this played, and then for complicated, interesting reasons the machinery blew up on their watch."

Kalven, who was the first to report details of the 16 shots that took Laquan's life and producer of the Showtime documentary "16 Shots," says there's value in making the distinction between a "cover-up" — in the Watergate scandal sense of the word — and what happened under Emanuel's watch.

"It's less about defending Rahm than being diagnostically clear," he said.

Emanuel didn't break laws or protocols requiring city officials to release video of police misconduct to the public because they did not exist in Chicago.

His administration used that reality for political advantage for as long as possible.

That might not be a "cover-up" the way Ferguson defines it in his letter of recommendation for Rahm, but the result was the same.

To some people, that's what matters most.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots."

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