Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg has recommended that Mayor Brandon Johnson fire his closest aide, senior mayoral adviser Jason Lee, for refusing to cooperate with her investigation of an alleged quid pro quo threat he made to a City Council member.
Witzburg did not identify Lee as the target of the long-running investigation outlined in her quarterly report. But Lee confirmed he was the subject. Witzburg indicated in the report that Johnson refused to fire Lee.
Lee denied having threatened Downtown Ald. Bill Conway (34th), and said he tried to cooperate with Witzburg. But he said Witzburg would not allow him to cooperate, after he insisted on having a representative from the city’s Law Department present during her interrogation.
Lee said Witzburg waited “15 months after the incident,” and then sent him 33 questions, forcing him to spend thousands of dollars on his own private counsel.
The probe centers on an alleged threat that Lee made against Conway in 2023, when Lee was trying to corral votes for two important items on the mayor’s progressive agenda.
Conway was trying to persuade the mayor’s office to remove a homeless encampment in the West Loop that he claimed was forcing his constituents to walk through a crime-prone gauntlet.
According to Conway, Lee conditioned that removal on the alderperson’s support for raising the transfer tax on high-end property transactions and the elimination of the subminimum wage for tipped workers.
Lee said it’s “my job to ask everybody” to support the mayor’s programs and legislative initiatives, and that’s what he was doing in his communications with Conway.
Lee said he told Conway that if he wanted the city to remove a homeless encampment, which requires “a lot of community engagement” and finding alternative housing for displaced residents, it “might be good” for Conway to “have some other legislation under your belt that you support that help the homeless and the poor.”
“That’s just a political conversation to give someone an incentive in voting for legislation. If they don’t agree with that interpretation, so be it. That’s fine. It’s just my idea. Of course it wasn’t a threat,” Lee said.
Lee added that he did cooperate with Witzburg’s investigation.
“They didn’t let me. … If my participation was so important, why did they deny my right to participate [with the Law Department present]? They’re not saying they never heard from me. They’re not saying I hid, I ran.”
Witzburg has been at loggerheads with the mayor’s office on a host of investigative issues. In July, she announced she would not seek another term as inspector general.
“If you get pulled over for speeding, you don’t get to tell the police officer that you intended to slow down,” Witzburg said about Lee. “The only effort to cooperate here came after we had already recommended that the subject be fired.”
Witzburg said she was “unable to reach any finding on the underlying investigation” of a quid pro quo threat because “the subject failed to cooperate.”
“There is widespread recognition in city government that people have a duty to cooperate with OIG and that accountability is a condition of a city job. The mayor’s office is alone here in refusing to recognize the importance of the duty to cooperate,” Witzburg said. “You do not get to hold the public trust and refuse to be accountable. That’s not how this works. We recommended that the subject of this investigation be fired just like we recommend that other city employees who failed to cooperate be fired.”
Conway said it is “demoralizing” that Johnson refused to fire Lee, adding that there is no question that Lee had conditioned removal of the homeless encampment on his vote for the mayor’s most important initiatives.
“He said, `If you want us to provide a basic clean-up for this, you need to vote to raise the real estate transfer taxes on working families in this city, and you need to vote for tipped credit,'” Conway said.
Conway questioned why Lee “feels the need to seemingly plead the fifth” in an inspector general’s office investigation.
“It fits in with the broader pattern of this administration thinking that law enforcement is the sickness,” Conway said. “And that’s why they feel like they’re above the law and don’t have to cooperate.”