Board fires director who hired activist in 'rape email'
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — The director of a state board that in early 2020 was forced to end a contract with a Democratic activist after his name surfaced in purported government coverups involving a rape and illegal state hiring has been removed from his job.
The Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board voted to fire Executive Director Brent Fischer on Sept. 8, Fischer's interim replacement, Keith Calloway, said Wednesday.
State records indicate Fischer, 54, who made $156,780, had been on paid administrative leave since June. Calloway and the standards board's chairman said they could not comment on the reason for Fischer's dismissal because it is a personnel matter. It is unclear if it was connected to his leadership of the agency in January 2020 when an incendiary email surfaced naming contract worker Forrest Ashby, prompting the board to cancel Ashby’s employment.
Ashby's connection to the board entangled it in the scandal in which a 2012 email was uncovered urging top staff members to then-Gov. Pat Quinn to be lenient with Ashby, then a state employee facing discipline. Written by Michael McClain, a retired lobbyist from Quincy and confidante of former House Speaker Michael Madigan, it said of Ashby: "He has kept his mouth shut on Jones’ ghost workers, the rape in Champaign and other items. He is loyal to the administration.”
At the time that WBEZ radio uncovered the email through a public records request, McClain and Madigan were under federal investigation involving utility giant ComEd and an alleged bribery scheme.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker called the email “horrific," noting that it referred to two crimes — a purported sexual assault and the alleged hiring of no-work employees by “Jones,” an apparent reference to former Senate President Emil Jones Jr.,...