Still deeper into the hole they go.
We finally got a response from Gov. JB Pritzker on what he knows about the Jenny Thornley matter, which we are following closely. As reported by The Center Square on Friday, Pritzker said he knows “Nothing other than what I read in the newspaper about it.” He added, “The truth is, if somebody committed workman’s comp fraud, they should be held accountable.” That’s all he said.
He either knows more about it than he said or he has been willfully derelict in his duty to find out what happened — the very duty to hold somebody accountable that he stated in his second sentence. Or both, which appears likely.
As background, his staff is alleged to have facilitated the award of a worker’s compensation claim to Jenny Thornley, a former state employee who earlier was a Pritzker campaign worker. After being terminated from her state job, she made the workers’ comp claim based on harm suffered in an alleged sexual harassment — a harassment that never occurred according to an investigation concluded at a cost of $550,000 to Illinois taxpayers. Payment on what therefore clearly appears to be a fraudulent workers’ comp claim continued for over a year after conclusion of that investigation, and it was allegedly awarded due to intervention by Pritzker’s own staff.
His claim that he knows nothing beyond the newspapers was made, as the Center Square accurately said, despite records alleging Thornley sent First Lady M.K. Pritzker a text message in February 2020 saying “I need JB to know.”
At the very minimum, Pritzker knows whether his wife did in fact let him know and how he responded thereto, none of which has been in the newspapers. Yet he did not provide that in his answer.
More importantly, if he really knows nothing and if he really wants to hold those accountable for the apparent fraud, he surely would long ago have asked his staff, “Hey, what do you know about this workers’ comp claim and what did you do to process it?”
This comes on top of what happened last week when Attorney General Kwame Raoul provided excuses for his failure to look into the matter — excuses that don’t square with the evidence.
The allegation that Pritzker’s staff did, in fact, help facilitate the fraudulent workers’ comp claim is highly credible. It has been made in two lawsuits, both of which are supported by documentary evidence.
First, the allegation is made by Jack Garcia in counterclaims filed in federal court. He was Thornley’s boss, against whom the bogus harassment claim was made. “To facilitate her Workers’ Compensation fraud,” Garcia’s filing says, “Thornley again repeated the false allegations against Garcia and relied on the aid of the Governor’s Office, even listing herself as an employee in that Office despite never having worked there.”
Garcia has a reputation for integrity, professionalism and credibility, which is expressly described in the 100-page investigative report exonerating him of the harassment claim.
Second, the allegation is also made in the whistleblower lawsuit filed by Emily Fox who worked in the same office with Thornley and Garcia and is now its executive director. From her complaint in that whistleblower lawsuit:
This extraordinary level of involvement by the Governor’s General Counsel in a workers’ compensation claim involving an independent agency of State government is a raw demonstration of improper political influence to assist a friend and supporter of the Governor at the expense of the People of the State of Illinois. It is made worse by the fact that the entire premise of Thornley’s workers’ compensation claim is the “assault”…that was debunked and proven false by both the $550,000.00 independent investigation undertaken by a law firm the Governor’s Office recommended and then again by an independent investigation of the Illinois State Police.
The legacy news media continue to ignore the Jenny Thornley matter entirely. They’ve asked about it only once, last week, when Pritzker and Raoul literally laughed the question off and Raoul went on to provide his apparently false excuses for doing nothing. But there was no followup in the press whatsoever aside from The Center Square.
Kudos, again, to The Center Square, which, alone, has been reporting on this.