- After incidents in which phone conversations with Chicago Tribune reporters were recorded without their consent by City Hall officials, a city attorney has insisted that there is no widespread practice of such taping and that steps have been taken to ensure it does not happen again.
Recording a conversation without the consent of all parties is a felony in Illinois.
"This failure was due to inadvertence — not some practice or plan to record interviews without consent," Stephen Patton, the city's corporation counsel, wrote Saturday in a letter to the Tribune, which had sent a letter to the city Friday demanding that such recordings cease.
Asked about the recordings at an unrelated news conference Monday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the issue was “much ado about nothing.”
“My view is, like all, we have a press conference here, I expect my staff to have a record of it,” he said. “And if I have a phone conversation, an interview, I expect to have a record of it as well.”
Inadvertence? What an asshole.
"One law for thee but not for me." Shouldn't someone be charged criminally? Let the courts sort it out?