What Did Mayor Lightfoot Know About Ethics Breach, When Did She Know It, and What Will She Do About It?
With Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s school email scandal still coming into focus, mayoral candidate and former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas is demanding answers to the many unanswered questions surrounding the Mayor’s unethical and potentially illegal actions. Vallas is calling on Mayor Lightfoot to publicly address the following issues in order to explain herself to Chicago voters:
Was Mayor Lightfoot aware that her campaign was pressuring teachers and students to support her campaign using their CPS email addresses, and that this is a clear violation of her own ethics policy and potentially illegal?
If Mayor Lightfoot was not aware of the scheme, will she take any disciplinary action against her campaign staffers for this blatant violation of the public trust?
How did Mayor Lightfoot’s campaign obtain the CPS teacher email list? Her campaign claims that the information was “publicly available,” but does that mean she manually built a database from available records, or was she given the full list?
Was there actually an agreement with the campaign and CPS to offer students class credit? If so, who at CPS authorized such a clear ethics violation? If there was not an agreement, did the Lightfoot campaign lie to students and teachers by claiming there would be an opportunity to earn school credit?
“While I believe that an independent joint investigation by the city and CPS Inspectors General is the best way to get to the bottom of this scandal, Chicago voters deserve to hear answers to these questions and more directly from Mayor Lightfoot herself right now,” said Vallas. “Public service is a public trust and we need to demand accountability and transparency from Mayor Lightfoot now to ensure that the integrity of our city government is not further compromised.”