A Chicago Inspector General is accusing Democrat Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office of stonewalling an investigation into his alleged secret stash of thousands of dollars in free gifts the mayor received from special interest groups.
In a report, entitled Advisory Concerning Gifts Accepted on Behalf of the City, an investigation has discovered Johnson has not been properly reporting the hundreds of expensive gifts he has been given, some of which was placed in what city hall staffers have called the “gift room,” an area they tried to prevent the IG from accessing, according to Austin Berg, a member of the Illinois Policy Institute.
Current city laws require the mayor to get permission from the city council to accept certain gifts, and it appears Johnson has skipped this step on multiple occasions. But under an “unwritten rule,” the Board of Ethics has allowed mayors to accept gifts without approval from the city council if the office assembles a “log book” of the gifts that is available to the public upon request.
However, the IG’s office sent representatives posing as regular citizens to the mayor’s office to ask for access to this log book, but were denied. Then the IG filed and FOIA request for access to the books as a regular person and was again denied. The IG finally had to make an official demand for the log book before the mayor’s office allowed access to the log.
The official records showed some of these secret gifts were stored in the mayor’s office while others were hidden away in a “gift room.”