Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel famously acknowledged a code of silence within the city’s police department 10 years ago, calling for “difficult conversations” after murder charges were filed over the fatal police shooting of teenager Laquan McDonald.
Now, Emanuel could be facing a “difficult conversation” of his own.
A decade after he delivered his remarks to the City Council, a federal judge says the onetime mayor “put himself in play” with his code-of-silence speech, as a civil trial over alleged police misconduct nears at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers — Al Hofeld, Andrew Stroth and others — say they plan to call Emanuel to the witness stand. U.S. District Judge John Tharp said this week he would not stand in their way.
That means Emanuel could find himself in a federal courtroom in a matter of days, testifying about what he told Chicagoans after video of McDonald’s murder went public.
That’s assuming he doesn’t find a way to avoid testifying in court, as he’s done before. The trial starts Monday.
It’s an example of how the police scandals that erupted during Emanuel’s two terms as mayor continue to follow him as he explores a presidential run in 2028. The Democrat is viewed as someone who is forcefully trying to shift his party’s direction.
A spokesman for the former mayor did not comment. Chicago’s law department declined to discuss the ruling, pointing to the ongoing litigation that dates back to 2018.
However, the city’s lawyers have objected in court. They’ve argued that Emanuel’s testimony would be a “sideshow” and create a “media firestorm.”
Guns pointed at children
The trial revolves around the execution of a set of search warrants on Aug. 9, 2018, in the 5000 block of South Hermitage. Officers had been told that a convicted felon lived in one residence and kept drugs and weapons in a residence next door, records show.
U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras previously handled the case and, in a September 2024 opinion, described police officers’ actions at what turned out to be the home of Ebony Tate, her four minor children and their 55-year-old grandmother.
Officers rushed into the home and screamed at Tate, forcing her and the children out of the home at gunpoint, the judge wrote. He said they did the same to the grandmother, Cynthia Eason, even though she was in a state of undress.
They were not suspects, they were not arrested and no contraband was found. It took a week for the family to clean up their home after the traumatizing ordeal, the judge wrote.
Emanuel’s testimony is relevant to arguments about the city’s policy and practice at the time, according to Tate’s lawyers. City lawyers have denied that a code of silence existed within CPD, records show.
That seems to contradict Emanuel’s December 2015 speech. In it, he described the code of silence as a “tendency to ignore, deny or, in some cases, cover up the bad actions of a colleague.”
Emanuel delivered the speech about two weeks after then-Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez charged Officer Jason Van Dyke in McDonald’s killing. A jury later found Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder, and a judge sentenced Van Dyke to 81 months in prison.
Emanuel’s administration fought to keep the dashboard camera video of McDonald’s shooting from being released for 13 months. In 2021, former Chicago Inspector General Joe Ferguson cleared Emanuel of wrongdoing in his handling of the McDonald case.
Ferguson did so as Emanuel awaited Senate confirmation to be U.S. ambassador to Japan.
A dark horse
Emanuel has been loudly criticizing Democrats for the failures of the 2024 election cycle — and what he views as a dire need for the party to move to the center to win back the White House in 2028.
Jumping from podcast to podcast and appearing on CNN as a commentator, he has angered progressives by accusing them of focusing on social issues like transgender bathrooms instead of education and crime.
Earlier this month, he told a group of Washington reporters he supports an age limit of 75 for the president, members of Congress, federal judges and cabinet members. That would preclude him from serving a second term if he actually did win the presidency.
He’s largely viewed as a dark-horse presidential candidate.
Emanuel faced intense questioning about the McDonald shooting during his 2021 confirmation hearing to serve as ambassador to Japan under President Joe Biden. He told senators that the “tragedy” weighed heavily on his mind.
“There’s not a day or a week that has gone by in the last seven years I haven’t thought about this and the what-ifs and the changes and what could have been,” Emanuel said during an October 2021 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was among progressive members of Congress trying to convince senators to block the nomination, calling it “an embarrassment and betrayal of the values we seek to uphold both within our nation and around the world.”
Emanuel’s nomination was ultimately approved with a bipartisan vote — although three progressive Democrats joined conservative Republicans in voting against his confirmation.
‘No good deed’
Tharp is not the first judge to think Emanuel’s code-of-silence speech could be the basis for potential testimony. In 2016, during Emanuel’s second term as mayor, then-U.S. District Judge Gary Feinerman reluctantly agreed that Emanuel could be called to the witness stand.
Feinerman made his ruling in the case of two officers who say they were branded as “rats” for helping federal investigators build a case against Sgt. Ronald Watts and Officer Kallatt Mohammed, who were both given prison time for shaking down drug dealers.
City Hall settled the case just before the trial began, scuttling Emanuel’s testimony.
Back then, Feinerman acknowledged his reluctance to impinge on the time of the mayor of the third-largest city in the country. He noted that Emanuel likely made his code-of-silence speech in an effort to repair the damage at the Chicago Police Department.
But, the judge said, his ruling proved the old adage that “no good deed goes unpunished.”