McHenry County Blog

When I learned that Mike Tristano had been sentenced to a year and a day in jail (his request, so he can qualify for a 15% good conduct reduction in sentence), I asked Rich Means, the man who started the ball rolling downhill that has now pretty much crushed ex-House Republican Leader Lee Daniels’ top aide.

Means was handed time sheets by a member of Daniels’ staff when Daniels refused to release them himself. Those time sheets showed that some of his House employees were working in McHenry County for non-incumbent House candidates in 2000 on state time.

Means gave his analysis of that information to then-Illinois Attorney General and GOP gubernatorial candidate Jim Ryan, who, in turn, passed them on the U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

The result was Lee Daniels’ resignation—at Jim Ryan’s request—from the chairmanship of the Illinois State Central Committee and deciding not to run for re-election as Republican House Leader.

Here are the comments that whistle-blower Means sent me:

I'm pleased that the law has finally caught up to Tristano. I'm particularly pleased that he got significant jail time and had to pay back $125,000 in restitution because those are important signals to both the seriousness of the crime and the fact that significant amounts of public money was stolen. Together with the Sorich convictions, public employees should now be clearly on notice that government offices can not be used for political advantage.

However, Tristano was only the hands-on staff operator of this longstanding theft of public funds to subsidize State Representative campaigns. He clearly did it for and with the knowledge of and with the participation of his boss Lee Daniels who, at the time, was the House Republican leader and the State Chairman of the Republican Party. It appears that Tristano will be a Government witness against Daniels who is clearly the "big fish" to be caught here.

When Daniels finally goes down, maybe the system will finally reform; not because the political leaders finally figure out that this kind of theft is wrong, but because they figure out this kind of theft just may be too darned expensive to them. I don't expect them to really embrace common ethics, only to recognize what is in their self-interest.

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