Rahm Emanuel Shows He's No Ambassador Of Truth At Senate Hearing

CHICAGO — How could anyone tell if former Mayor Rahm Emanuel wasn’t telling the whole truth during Wednesday’s U.S. Senate hearing in advance of a confirmation vote on his pending appointment as America’s ambassador to Japan?

Well, his lips were moving. In my reporting experience, that’s a keen indicator that Rahm might be fibbing, at least a little, regardless of the topic.

Take, for instance, Emanuel’s answers during the nine-minute grilling Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) gave him about his involvement in efforts to cover-up video showing a Chicago police officer shooting Laquan McDonald with every bullet in his gun — 16 shots — until the black teenager was dead seven years ago to the day.

Merkley asked Emanuel if he learned of details of Laquan’s murder when his administration in April 2015 negotiated a $5 million settlement, complete with a non-disclosure agreement, with the family.

“As I said, when the video became public [in November 2015] is when I learned what happened and the consequence of what happened that night,” Emanuel said under oath.

Funny thing is, journalist Jaime Kalven broke the news that Laquan had been shot 16 times in February 2015.

Emanuel’s then corporation counsel, Steven Patton, testified before a City Council committee in April 2015 — shortly after the mayor won re-election — and confirmed that Laquan had been shot 16 times while Patton made his pitch to win aldermanic approval for a $5 million settlement with the late teenager’s family before a lawsuit was filed.

On Wednesday, Emanuel told the U.S. Senate committee considering his appointment as ambassador that the City Council approved the settlement “50-0,” which isn’t technically true.

A 17-member committee forwarded the settlement proposal to the full council for a vote. The $5 million payout was lumped together with two other police misconduct settlements listed as “Item 5,” which passed 47-0 without any discussion. In fact, the settlement was approved based on a previous finance committee vote on another topic.

Plenty of people believe that Patton snowed aldermen to get approval of the settlement deal, which included a provision that prohibited Laquan's family from making the video of the teen's death public.

In December, after a judge forced Emanuel to release the video, Ald. Howard Brookins — who voted to approve the settlement — said he believed Emanuel’s administration purposely misled the City Council committee to believe City Hall wasn’t allowed to release video of Laquan’s murder.

Nobody who didn't live through City Hall's con job on Laquan's murder — particularly a senator from Oregon under a strict time limit— was going press hard enough to get Emanuel to break from his script of half-truths. He even said, after myriad of investigations by the city inspector general and a special prosecutor, that no one concluded he or anyone in his office "did anything improper."

Well, there's a reason for that. No one — neither the feds nor the "independent" police watchdog nor the state's top prosecutor, Attorney General Kwame Raoul — probed the way Patton handled the $5 million payout that coincidentally got quietly negotiated while Emanuel campaigned for a second term.

Every investigation centered on the actions of the police department — even the U.S. Justice Department's probe that found a police legacy of corruption and abuse — without pointing a watchdog's investigative sniffer in the direction of Emanuel's administration.

Before Merkley’s allotted time to question Emanuel expired Wednesday, the Oregon Democrat mentioned a letter from Chicago public officials calling for the Senate to reject the former mayor’s appointment — and expressed disbelief that Emanuel was actually clueless about details of Laquan’s murder and efforts to keep video of the teen's death secret for as long as the former mayor claims.

“Because all these things happened. The family requested the video, the city attorney reached out proactively because there was a lawsuit to ask for a settlement, the settlement was approved in a less than one-minute meeting with no public discussion. It seems hard to believe that all those things happened and yet you were never briefed on the details of the situation when you were leading the city,” Merkley said.

In typical Emanuel fashion, he dodged the senator’s assertion by reminding the Senate committee that some Black city officials — Alderpersons Jason Ervin, Michael Scott Jr., Greg Mitchell, Anthony Beale, Michelle Harris, Stephanie Coleman, Walter Burnett, Emma Mitts and Brookins —happen to think he’d be an excellent ambassador to Japan.

“Since you brought up aldermanic letters, as you see here, the leadership of the [Chicago City Council] Black Caucus has signed a letter in support of my nomination. Those are members that worked with me,” Emanuel said.

What Rahm didn't mention, though, is that in 2018 he showered eight of the aldermen with $20,000 campaign donations each as he left office without giving voters a chance to oust him.

Then, Emanuel seemed to blame, well, America's criminal justice system and provisions in police union contracts and state laws that allowed his administration the means to keep video of Laquan’s murder quiet until after he won re-election.

“It doesn’t take away from the fact that all those are not technicalities. This is a tragedy that happened," he said. "No city of any size has not confronted the gulf and the gap that exists between police practices and the oversight and accountability. I made efforts of them, they missed the mark because they totally missed how deep that distrust is … how broken the system is we all relied on.”

For me, Emanuel's evasive testimony — a spattering of non-answers, half-truths and omitted details — is the same stuff that turned Chicago aldermen into unwitting co-conspirators in the effort to keep video of Laquan's murder from public view.

The Rahm con job continues. Will senators fall for it like a rubber-stamp City Council? Do they even care?

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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