The top 25 individual funders of Eileen O’Neill Burke’s bid to be Cook County’s top prosecutor include no African Americans and no women, a WBEZ analysis of her Illinois campaign filings has found.
Those 25 donors — venture capitalists, investment managers, traders, real estate developers, upscale restaurant chain owners, personal-injury lawyers, and so on — account for about half of the $3.1 million in campaign fundraising that O’Neill Burke had reported to the state by Thursday afternoon, just a few days before the end of voting Tuesday. The donors are all white men with an average age of 61.
The top 25 donors also have donated more than $5 million to Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump and other conservative causes, such as the National Rifle Association, the National Right to Life PAC, and the Republican National Committee. In addition to the donations from rich, white, conservative Republican donors, Burke’s commitment to civil rights has been questioned since she also accepted a large campaign contribution from Stephen Patton, the lawyer who led the City Hall cover-up of the footage of LaQuan McDonald’s murder under Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Other Democratic political candidates have returned Patton’s donations which were deemed unacceptable to candidates who are committed to civil rights.
Burke defeated Democratic Party backed candidate Clayton Harris in the Democratic primary in part by campaigning as a conservative, law-and-order candidate who attracted nearly 40,000 crossover votes from voters who normally vote in the Republican primary.
From the beginning of her campaign, Burke has had a difficult time uniting her party. During Democratic party slating, 38th Ward Democratic committeeman and State Senator Rob Martwick accused her of being a “Republican running as a Democrat.” 22nd ward Committeeman Michael Rodriguez questioned Burke’s Democratic credentials after she personally donated to a Republican Judge candidate recently. The Chicago Tribune recently referred to O’Neill Burke as a “defacto Republican, while the Republican nominee, Bob Fioretti, was until recently a longtime Democrat who is being backed in the general election by progressive icon the Rev. Jesse Jackson.”
Rev. Jackson criticized O’Neill Burke for the way she handled the prosecution of an 11-year-old black boy charged with the murder of an elderly white woman in 1994. The charges were ultimately tossed out by a federal judge, who found the boy’s confession had been coerced by Chicago police.
Just as Burke’s opponents in the Democratic primary who supported Foxx ally Clayton Harris III, Jackson zeroed in on Burke’s statement in court that the boy was “a whole new breed of criminal.”
In his statement endorsing Fioretti, Jackson said: “To our community, this racist statement is disqualifying.”
Jackson urged Cook County voters to “split” their vote.
Burke has steadfastly refused to appear with her opponents in the general election for any debates or community forums. Since the primary, she has rarely been seen at community events, and her campaign often turns down media interviews from African-American owned media outlets.
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