We’re on our own: What Blagojevich’s pardon and the Eric Adams case mean for Illinois

On Monday, President Trump pardoned former Governor Rod Blagojevich, while the Justice Department told federal prosecutors to drop the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. These moves were shocking in their brazen disregard of the costs of public corruption, and they could portend a retreat from such cases under the new administration.

Illinois has long been a top target for federal prosecutors, garnering the most corruption convictions in the country. For decades, federal authorities have provided a critical check on official misconduct in Chicago and the state. Now we need to prepare for that to change.

“We can no longer rely on the federal government to deal with Illinois’ corruption problems,” said Alisa Kaplan, Executive Director of Reform for Illinois. “We hope state’s attorneys and other local officials will expand their role in stopping the wrongdoing that wastes taxpayer money, undermines trust, and hurts our most vulnerable communities.”

Kaplan said that the administration’s actions, along with the scandals surrounding former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan (who is awaiting a verdict in his federal corruption trial), also highlighted the need to strengthen ethics rules that could head off misconduct before it happens. “The best estimate is that the feds will back off of vigorous prosecution of corruption because Trump thinks it’s not important, and he’s going to convey that to the Justice Department,” said Dick Simpson, who has spent his career studying corruption in Illinois.

The firing of DOJ prosecutors and anticipated firing of hundreds of FBI agents will also reduce federal resources for investigating and prosecuting such cases, he said.

“There is just a yawning opportunity for prosecution of public corruption cases at the state level,” said Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg in a recent Reform for Illinois podcast. “State laws currently on the books provide tremendous opportunity to prosecute bribery and fraud and official misconduct.”

The attorney general and state’s attorney “should be taking a larger role,” Simpson said.

Former Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx pursued slightly more than a hundred corruption-related cases in her two terms, mainly “low-level government workers accused of relatively small offenses,” the Sun-Times reported last year.

New state’s attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke said she would make public corruption a “top priority” during her campaign last year.

Under Kwame Raoul, the Illinois Attorney General’s Public Integrity Bureau has prosecuted dozens of officials charged with fraud related to the Covid-era Paycheck Protection Program, but the office’s criminal prosecutions focus mainly on consumer fraud, Simpson said.

Want to learn more? Join us for next Wednesday’s Civil Disagreements panel, which will discuss how recent SCOTUS decisions and a second Trump administration will impact state and local corruption cases in Illinois.