A massive email dump released by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office details the internal communications surrounding Laquan McDonald’s death and the negotiations with McDonald family lawyers. Protests and calls for Emanuel’s resignation have sounded throughout Chicago after police released video of police officer Jason Van Dyke shooting McDonald 16 times in late 2014, killing him. Van Dyke has been charged with murder, the first on-duty Chicago officer so charged in over three decades.
The email collection, released after open records request and diligently cataloged by a group of citizens and reporters including Streetsblog reporter Steven Vance, can be viewed in its entirety here. While much of the info released was already known, the emails detail the depth of knowledge that Emanuel’s office had about the shooting beforehand and the details behind the $5 million in hush money that the office paid to the McDonald family during an election in which Emanuel faced a formidable challenge. Lawyers within the mayor’s office, including Stephen Patton and Thomas Platt, pressured the McDonald family early to keep the video under wraps for a time period that could have spanned years. The Daily Beast reports:
“The provision as drafted, that we maintain the confidentiality, of the materials—principally the dash-cam-video—until the criminal charges are concluded, which could be in effect for years, is entirely unreasonable,” [McDonald estate lawyer Michael Robbins] wrote to Platt on April 6. “Nor was any such broad sweeping confidentiality provision discussed during our meetings.”
“I’ll call you,” Platt wrote Robbins on April 7.
That was the same day that Emanuel was fighting for his political life in a runoff election after he failed to win 50 percent of the primary vote in the February. (Emanuel won with 56 percent against Chuy Garcia.)
Emanuel had maintained since McDonald’s death that he has never seen the dash-cam video, but the emails prove the mayor knew exactly what the footage showed when city lawyers negotiated a deal that would at least delay the video’s release. [...]
Emanuel’s lawyers were offering $5 million in hush money to keep this hidden just weeks before the runoff election. And the biggest part of the deal—that McDonald family attorneys agreed to keep the video to themselves until criminal proceedings were concluded—just so happened to be inked the day after Emanuel was re-elected.
If not for the efforts of journalists Jamie Kalven and Brandon Smith and the Invisible Institute, along with activists like William Calloway, the video may have not seen the light of day until after Van Dyke was safe. Not through the end of the investigation to protect the process, as the office later claimed, but through the entire end of the criminal proceedings. Given the role that the video’s impending release seems to have had on the indictment itself, it is possible that Van Dyke may have never even faced charges. The video was delayed at least long enough to keep Emanuel out of any serious trouble during his campaign for re-election, and the settlement was quickly ushered through. Is it possible to read this chain of events as anything other than political maneuvering?