IROQUOIS CO.—This one is a little out of our area, but we had to cover it because our friends the Edgar County Watchdogs have been threatened once again with a frivolous lawsuit.
You may recall what happened a little over a year ago with former Edgar County deputy Dee Burgin, who lied to an attorney (by omission, of course) and got him to threaten a lawsuit against not only the Watchdogs, but against us because we were printing documented facts about the errant boob. Poor Deeboy didn’t like what we were saying, so he convinced a Chicago-area attorney to send us a threatening letter advising if we didn’t “cease and desist,” they were going to file a defamation suit against us…to which we responded by telling him “FILE. We’ll see you in court with a trunkful of subpoenas and find out what Deeboy has been having for breakfast the past 40 years, as well as everything he’s been doing in between times.” They of course did NOT file. The reason is clear: there was a lot more Deeboy had to hide, and with subpoena power—which we get when we’re sued in any form, meaning we can request, and obtain, financial, medical, and other personal records from the person who’s stupid enough to sue us—we were going to find it ALL out. Deeboy’s high-powered attorney probably advised him of that, and that we were not your average ordinary dumbasses, and that he’d better back the hell out while the backing was good. This he did; we heard nothing else out of him about the matter. And within six months, he was no longer a deputy for Edgar County. He’s now a pissant cop in Newman, a little burg in Douglas County.
And as we pointed out in the post a year ago, every time someone from a REAL media outlet moves into a county and starts asking real, direct questions about things that impact the taxpayers there, there’s always a backlash. This happens to us at Disclosure, and now it’s happening to the Edgar County Watchdogs. Their presence and expertise was requested in upstate Iroquois County, where there were some alleged problems at the county health department (health departments are like a cash cow for some people; in many of our downstate counties, we’ve had incidents of anything from folks outright stealing from them, such as in the case of Cindy Crewell in Lawrence, to entire entities basing their existence on them, as in Jess Angle and the problematic Lawrence County Emergency Management Agency in that same county, which pretty much wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the health department giving Angle somewhere to alight). The alleged problems in Iroquois at the Ford-Iroquois Public Health Department (FIPHD) had more to do with some reported shell-gaming and sleight-of-hand of one of their employees (public official, or PO) and her husband, Julie and Stanley Clark. Seems the Clarks own several businesses that were benefiting from grant money that was coming through the FIPHD. Red flags should be going up in front of you right now over the fact of a PUBLIC employee being in a position to filter PUBLIC funds (grant money) into her PRIVATE business. But apparently, this is just de rigeuer for Iroquois County. And so someone brought this to the attention of the Watchdogs, and here we are.
In February, the Watchdogs began submitting FOIAs (freedom of information act requests) to the PUBLIC health department (PUBLIC because it’s funded by, you guessed it, taxpayers’ dollars) and the showdown began. As you can see by the responses, there were matters of what the Watchdogs called “vast questionable expenditures” (by a PUBLIC body—the health department)—chief among these being a health department budget that has been amended for the past two years, but without the approval of the county boards at whose authority the FIPHD serves at all. You can read about many of the other spurious things the health department was doing, and that are being called into question, at this article. One of the most egregious, in our opinion, was an ongoing plan for the FIPHD—an Illinois entity—to provide home health services for two counties across the river in Indiana. The shout-out should go to the Ford and Iroquois county boards, who took action immediately upon learning that their apparently out-of-control health department was doing things with Illinois tax dollars that Indiana was going to benefit from, without, it appears, any influx of Indiana dollars…as well as without county board approval, such as they were doing with their health department budgets, amending them for the past two years without bothering to run the amendments past the county boards.
And from there, it just got worse.
Needs no further captioning.
Apparently, there’s a director of the FIPHD, Doug Corbett, who has done a little more than benefit from inside information on grants like the Clarks were alleged to have done: this guy kind of set up his own little “banking” institution from within the framework of the health department. You can read all about that in this post that appeared today at the Watchdog’s website; our mouths are still agape from this.
As a result of the FOIA investigation into Corbett, the Watchdogs received this letter from another apparently clueless attorney, who doesn’t seem to understand what a PUBLIC BODY is.
Folks, it doesn’t get any more real than this.
This is what happens when real media comes to town, starts asking the tough questions, gets real answers that are undeniable as they are from FOIA’d material…and the PUBLIC officials don’t like it. They whine to an attorney—ostensibly being paid for by taxpayers’ money, our Watchdogs might want to look into THAT aspect of it—and the attorney makes threats. Attorneys think they’re demigods these days. That’s because no one challenges them.
Well by god they’re being challenged now.
We put this out here because we wanted to bring you the report of what the Watchdogs are doing…but also because we wanted to see if these moronic lawyers are going to challenge us, too.
The clock’s ticking.
Let’s see what happens; we’ll keep you apprised.