Questions Mount Over Pritzker Administration’s Involvement In Thornley’s Alleged Fraud – UPDATED – Wirepoints

UPDATE 7/29/22: Yesterday, the Center Square reported this statement from the attorney general’s press secretary: “The Attorney General’s office moved the [overtime] case forward by referring allegations of theft and forgery to the State Appellate Prosecutor’s office, and criminal charges are pending against Ms. Thornley as a result,” Raoul press secretary Annie Thompson said. “Just as we referred the theft and forgery allegations, we have referred that Ms. Thornley committed workers compensation fraud to the appellate prosecutor’s office. Our understanding is the matter is under review by that office.”

But now a court order has come to light dated April 7, 2021 appointing the state appellate prosecutor as special counsel, and that order was pursuant to a motion by the Sangamon County States Attorney, not the AG as the press secretary said. We will continue to follow this.

By: Mark Glennon*

If you know nothing so far about this matter, consider this: Illinois taxpayers paid $550,000 for an independent investigation that cleared a state supervisor of a sexual harassment claim by an employee named Jenny Thornley. Yet Thornley collected money on a workers’ compensation claim for physical and emotional damage based on that same sexual harassment claim – even after the investigation concluded that the harassment didn’t happen. And the agency that employed Thornley never even knew about the workers’ comp claim until after it was being paid. Instead, the office of Gov. JB Pritzker pushed it through without that agency’s knowledge, according to court filings.

Answers already were needed back in December from the administration of Gov. JB Pritzker, we wrote then, about the Thornley saga.

But no answers came and the questions have become still more serious thanks to additional allegations and evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit recently unsealed and made public. It was filed by Emily Fox, who was the program administrator and is now executive director of the State Police Merit Board, which is the agency Thornley worked for. It’s hardly the biggest scandal in Illinois history in terms of dollars, but it tells volumes about how things work in the state if it is as accurate as it appears to be.

From the complaint in that whistleblower lawsuit:

This extraordinary level of involvement by the Governor’s General Counsel in a workers’ compensation claim involving an independent agency of State government is a raw demonstration of improper political influence to assist a friend and supporter of the Governor at the expense of the People of the State of Illinois. It is made worse by the fact that the entire premise of Thornley’s workers’ compensation claim is the “assault”…that was debunked and proven false by both the $550,000.00 independent investigation undertaken by a law firm the Governor’s Office recommended and then again by an independent investigation of the Illinois State Police.

And the intervention by Gov. JB Pritzker’s office was done covertly, the evidence suggests, as characterized in last week’s Daily Wire column: “The office of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker arranged to have the state secretly pay a former campaign aide who had been fired from her government job for stealing after she threatened to use her connections to get out of trouble, a state official claimed in a newly unsealed legal filing.”

The backstory you need to fully understand this saga is summarized in that Daily Wire column. You could also watch Tom DeVore’s presentation on Facebook, which walks through the facts and documentary evidence in a plain English manner the way a lawyer would talk to a jury. Links to key documents are included. DeVore is a candidate for Illinois attorney general so he has a political interest in this matter. However, based on my review of all documents available, his presentation is an accurate summary of what we know, and he is right to be pounding the table about it.

Thornley was an employee of the Merit Board. She had also worked as a campaign volunteer for various Illinois Democrats, including Pritzker in 2018.

Around January 2020, Thornley got wind that the Merit Board’s executive director, Jack Garcia, was looking into whether Thornley had been cheating on overtime pay and expense claims, which would likely lead to her dismissal.

Thornley then undertook a strategy, according to court filings, of “aggressively leveraging her political influence and powerful connections to insulate her from any accountability…retaliating against anyone who would dare to pierce her bubble of political influence to hold her accountable” and she “manufactured allegations against her supervisor….”

She sent emails to some of Pritzker’s top aides and a text to the governor’s wife over the weekend of the 2020 Super Bowl asking for help.

Thornley was fired by the Merit Board in July 2020 and indicted in September 2021 by a grand jury in Springfield for the alleged salary and expense padding.

These are among the questions brought into sharper focus by Fox’s April 2021 whistleblower lawsuit:

Why did the governor’s office intervene to help Thornley? The Merit Board itself wasn’t even aware of the Thornley workers compensation claim based on the phony sexual harassment charge until September 2020 when the benefit was already being paid. Thornley had filed for the claim listing Pritzker himself as her supervisor and provided his phone numbers. In truth, she had never worked in the governor’s office.

“Thornley did not make this claim to the Merit Board, which employed her,” as Fox’s court filing says. Instead, “leveraging her relationship with the Pritzkers, Thornley made the claim directly to the Governor’s General Counsel, [Ann] Spillane. And Spillane accepted that claim and processed it, even though the claim falsely listed Thornley’s employer as the Governor’s Office rather than the Merit Board.… Of course, these statements were false, as Spillane would have had to know.”

The governor’s office did even more to help. The Merit Board moved to fire Thornley early in 2020 and seek criminal prosecution for the alleged payroll abuse but, according to court filings, the governor’s office advised the board not to do so and instead put both her and Garcia on paid leave, which it did.

The Merit Board apparently got fed up with the interference from the governor’s office. Its chairman wrote to the governor’s office in April 2020 that “The Board is unanimously of the view that this has gone on long enough, that your intervention was and remains unwise and inappropriate… If the Governor feels differently, I would welcome the opportunity to discuss the entire situation with him.”

Four of the five Merit Board members have since been replaced, according to the Daily Wire. Hmmm.

Was the involvement of Pritzker’s office a matter helping a friend and former campaign worker?

Maybe – and that would be bad enough – but there’s a stronger possibility, which is that Thornley was also threatening Pritzker with something, which appears to have happened.

Thornley stated at the beginning and end of a call with Spillane that she “looks at the Pritzkers as friends” and doesn’t want them to be on the front page of the newspaper.” Deputy General Counsel Scott Lerner likewise recalls a call he had with Spillane and Thornley on February 3, 2020 or February 4, 2020, in which Thornley made comments to the effect of “I just really want to make sure that this doesn’t look bad for Governor Pritzker and MK Pritzker.” Lerner interpreted the comment in the context in which it was made to be a soft threat. That’s all according to the 100-page investigative report prepared by Christina Egan, a former federal prosecutor now with the McGuire Woods law firm.

The issue then becomes what exactly Thornley was threatening Pritzker with. Pritzker’s office apparently had nothing to do with the payroll padding charges against her so it would have to be something else. What?

Why did the state spend such an exceptionally large amount – $550,000 – investigating the sexual harassment claim? Egan’s investigation and report were done at the direction of the governor’s office. The average settlement for sexual harassment claims is only $53,000. Something strange was going on that prompted the governor’s office to get a gold plated investigative report.

Why is Attorney General Kwame Raoul doing nothing about the fraudulent workers’ comp charges and the claims implicating Pritzker’s office, and why was the whistleblower claim dismissed?

At this time, there is apparently no effort underway to hold anybody accountable in any way for the workers’ comp fraud by Thornley or the involvement of the governor’s office in getting it approved.

To the contrary, Raoul’s office successfully got the whistleblower complaint dismissed. The judge’s order explaining his reasoning is here. Note that it relies on exceptionally broad discretion the attorney general has to dismiss whistleblower lawsuits.

That makes a travesty out of the Illinois whistleblower law. Maybe the judge correctly applied the caselaw on Illinois’ whistleblower statute; I don’t know and have not researched it. But if he’s correct, it means the attorney general has broad discretion to kill whistleblower claims against his political allies, which completely undermines the purpose of the law.

The only circumstance where a judge may override the attorney general, according to the ruling, is when there’s “glaring evidence of fraud or bad faith.”

Is the evidence not glaring here?

On that question, it’s essential to note that many of the claims made by Fox in her whistleblower complaint about the intrusions by the governor’s office are corroborated by Garcia in a separate lawsuit against Thornley for defamation. Garcia is particularly well regarded. His reputation for integrity is described in the investigative report that rejected the sexual harassment claim. Garcia’s corroboration seems to have been disregarded by the court that heard the whistleblower claim. His court filing says, “After hearing Thornley’s lies, high-ranking officials within the Governor’s Office inserted themselves into the investigative process, urged the Merit Board to suspend Garcia, and strongly discouraged the Merit Board from taking any action against Thornley for her fraud until an independent investigation could be conducted.”

In any event, it’s important to remember that the court did not make any finding that the facts asserted in the whistleblower complaint were wrong. Instead, it dismissed the complaint because of the exceptionally high level of discretion the attorney general was allowed and the very difficult hurdle required to overrule that discretion.

What’s the excuse for why the Democratic majority in the General Assembly got Garcia removed? Republican lawmakers say a provision was “surreptitiously added” by Democrats to the 850-page crime reform bill shortly before it passed in the early morning hours of Jan. 13. The provision bars anyone who has worked for the State Police, such as Garcia, from holding the Merit Board position Garcia held. Democrats say it was part of a responsible redirection of the board, as the Tribune reported, but the timing sure makes it look like retribution against somebody who didn’t play along.

Finally, where are Illinois media on this? The Chicago Tribune had five good articles last year, but that is all we have seen from the regular media in Illinois and the Tribune’s work was before the whistleblower suit was unsealed. Only The Center Square has reported on the matter since then.

The Pritzker Administration has offered no comment on any of it. Why would they? Nobody is even asking. And DeVore has asked if there was a “conspiracy to commit fraud” within the Pritzker Administration, and said the affair is emblematic of Illinois corruption and failure by Raoul, his opponent for attorney general. But nobody has covered that, either.

Never come to judgement until you have heard both sides. That rule applies here as well, but is it too much for reporters to at least ask the Pritzker Administration for its side? Start with the questions above. Demand answers.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.

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