Ethics Check
Ethics Check
Why did the University of Illinois send their response to a mom's FOIA request to the Governor's Office first?
In his first letter to the church at Thessalonica, the Apostle Paul admonished his audience, “Abstain from all appearance of evil.”1 In other words, don’t just refrain from doing actually-wrong things — avoid making it look to others like you’re doing something wrong.
After reading emails obtained from Illinois’ largest public university, I have the same advice for its employees.
On April 25, 2022, Naperville mom Gracia Livie submitted a request to the University of Illinois under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), asking for emails between Ron Watkins, Managing Director of SHIELD Illinois, and then-Deputy Governor of Illinois for Education, Jesse Ruiz.
Seven days later, on May 2nd at 5:50 p.m., Livie received 67 pages of responsive documents, some heavily redacted.
Little did she know, before the U of I sent her the documents, senior FOIA officer Jillian Weathers had sent them to Shannon Learned, who handles FOIA requests to the Governor’s office, and to Jennifer Creasy, Senior Director of State Relations in U of I’s governmental relations office.*
“Can you please share with your governor’s office contacts?” Weather asked Creasy. The email was sent two and a half hours before Live received the responsive documents, many of which discussed the SHIELD Illinois saliva test in K12 schools.
Creasy obliged by forwarding the email and attachment to Martin Torres, the current Illinois Deputy Governor for Education, who forwarded it to Scott Lerner, Deputy General Counsel in the Governor’s Office.
Torres’s and Lerner’s reactions are redacted as attorney communications; both men’s emails were sent after U of I responded to Gracia Livie. No other emails appear in this chain.
It’s worth noting that all FOIA requests in the state of Illinois are public - there’s nothing private or secret about Gracia Livie’s request, or the response.
I’m less concerned about public entities notifying one another about FOIAs than I am the appearance of the state’s flagship university making a preliminary decision about documents in its possessions that a citizen lawfully requested, and then making sure the Governor’s office is okay with the response and redactions.
Even if that’s legal, it raises serious ethical questions. For example:
Is this standard practice for U of I’s FOIA office? Do the Governor’s people get rights of approval every time the university is about to send FOIA-responsive records that include the Governor’s staff? Or was this simply a “heads-up,” extended as a one-time courtesy?
Are all FOIA requests related to SHIELD Illinois shared with the Governor’s office, per a directive, for a blessing before they are sent?
Is this kind of “collaboration” between public entities around FOIA responses common in Illinois, which has very broad and permissive open records laws?
Maybe this is about the individual requestor? Ms. Livie is a full-time mom, but also a leader in the year-old, grassroots organization Awake Illinois, and is very active on Twitter. Are her requests routinely forwarded between public agencies? Does U of I - or does the Governor’s Office - have a list of “problem” citizens?
I’m curious, too, about what Martin Torres and Scott Lerner said to each other - and whether there were phone calls or other emails exchanged over this request.
Closer to home, I’ve received responses to FOIA requests from U of I in the past two years. Some of those records have been communications between university and state employees, and some have been redacted. I can’t help but wonder if anyone outside the school received notice of or was altered to my requests.
This much is clear: 1) U of I contacting the Governor’s office over this is a bad look, and 2) Gracia Livie was asking for emails that made (or were could make) someone nervous.
Read the documents she received and judge for yourself:
University of Illinois Responsive Records to G.Livie FOIA_050222
*The email images in this article were obtained via another FOIA request that Gracia Livie submitted to the Governor’s Office, in which she asked for “emails sent to or from Martin Torres with any of the terms ‘SHIELD,’ ‘TRO,’ ‘test to stay,’ from May 1 - June 1 2022”.
Note: I took a break from posting on Twitter til July, but I set this Substack article to automatically post there.
I Thessalonians 5:22