From Doug Ibendahl at Republican News Watch:
The Chicago Tribune endorsed Bruce Rauner in the GOP Primary and it’s now endorsed him for the General Election too. This comes as a surprise to no one.
No doubt the editorial board already had its love letter written and ready to go even as the Tribune had one diligent reporter in Tampa three weeks ago covering the first days of an ongoing trial in U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Plaintiffs there seek to prove that private equity firm GTCR participated in a massive, fraudulent scheme to unlawfully hide assets and thus prevent nursing home victims’ families from recovering for the suffering and death of loved ones. Bruce Rauner isn’t individually named as a defendant in the case, but GTCR is and Rauner was at the helm of GTCR as its chairman when all of the alleged wrongdoing took place.
That diligent Tribune reporter, David Heinzmann, provided some excellent coverage from the first week of trial, but there has been nothing since. Perhaps inconvenient facts like testimony that ownership of the toxic parts of GTCR’s once high-flying nursing home chain were somehow unloaded on a visibly confused elderly graphic artist who thought he was only getting some computer equipment was causing too much cognitive dissonance for the Tribune bosses back home in Chicago. I have no idea.
So how does the Chicago Tribune deal with the nursing home abuse which occurred during Rauner’s watch, the alleged fraud to avoid responsibility, the proven massive accounting fraud at one GTCR owned company, the numerous executives criminally convicted at others, the $13 million dollar settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice for Medicare/Medicaid fraud in Georgia, the settlement of a civil RICO lawsuit in Ohio, and Rauner’s alleged threat against a female executive and her family?
And further, how does the Tribune deal with the fact Rauner was a fierce opponent of the pension reform bill which passed in December? Rauner not only opposed the bill, he did his best to derail it. The Tribune preached in favor of the bill for months. Shortly before that December vote, the editorial board told lawmakers it would be “a vote that would define them.” But the Tribune didn’t stop there, it warned lawmakers that not supporting the bill would be to “declare that you’re the problem.”
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