Chicago City Wire

The open-records lawsuit that an advocacy organization filed last week against Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx is just the tip of the iceberg, according to Pat O’Brien, a former judge and Republican candidate who is gunning to replace Foxx as Cook County State’s Attorney.

“The real truth is Kim Foxx is concealing information about high-profile cases and failed to tell the truth about so many major issues when confronted regarding transparency,” O’Brien said. “[The other day] Foxx was sued for repeatedly stonewalling the Chicago Justice Project’s request for felony case data. She refuses to release key data that should be publicly accessible.”

The Chicago Justice Project (CJP) sued the State’s Attorney’s Office after it denied FOIA requests earlier this year for felony prosecution data, access to their database and employee correspondence regarding the database.

Foxx | File photo

"The very day that Kim Foxx was sworn in as the state's attorney four years ago, she made promises to voters,” O’Brien told the Chicago City Wire. “First she promised sweeping new paths of transparency and she promised to meet the community. To state that Kim Foxx has failed miserably on both of these promises is a dramatic understatement.”

A previous lawsuit filed by CJP ended in a 2017 settlement in which workers from the State’s Attorney’s Office vowed to provide transparency and cooperate. However, O’Brien said that hasn’t happened.

“The lawsuit is going to continue because Kim Foxx has effectively stonewalled and broken the agreement she signed in 2017,” he said. “Hopefully, when I'm elected, we're going to talk to the attorneys representing the Chicago Justice Project. I'm in favor of allowing the statistics and dispositions in the office to be fully transparent."

 A statement on the CJP website said the state’s attorney office is hiding data and refusing to talk about it further.

“As we saw from her actions in the Jussie Smollett case, Foxx is not above trying to conceal her failures and her political agenda from public view,” O’Brien said. “It's unclear to me what we'll find but I'm guessing it won't be good.”

O’Brien, who served as Cook County Circuit Court judge for eight years, vowed that the Chicago Justice Project won’t face any obstacles if he’s elected state's attorney.

“The groups that handled domestic violence and domestic assault have been very upset with her lack of transparency, including the filing of charges, what occurs with charges after they are filed, whether there are any reductions in those charges and what her record is in connection with trials,” O’Brien alleged. “Given Ms. Foxx’s other record of losing cases, I'm not surprised she is reluctant to identify all the cases of domestic violence and violent criminal sexual assault because she may have failed miserably to protect women and children from abuse due to her lack of training and experience.”