Since 1999, Ald. Walter Burnett Jr. (27th) has reported investing $375,000 of the $4.2 million in campaign contributions he’s gotten from political supporters — but $300,000 of the invested money has disappeared from his campaign-finance reports, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.
Where’s the missing money?
Burnett won’t talk about it. He has declined to answer reporters’ questions about his campaign reports, which he has frequently amended, some of them as many as five times.
The Chicago City Council member says in a text message in response to questions: “I don’t feel comfortable talking about that with you. It’s not my city business.”
But he says he hasn’t converted any campaign-fund investments into personal income: “Of course, I didn’t cash them into my personal account.”
Nor has he explained where the money went to the Illinois State Board of Elections, which says it has known for several months that Burnett’s campaign fund stopped reporting what it’s done with the invested contributions, which it’s required to do under state law.
The state elections board has the authority to fine Burnett’s campaign fund. If it deems the offense bad enough, it also could report any campaign-finance violations to the Illinois attorney general’s office to consider for possible prosecution.
But state elections officials have been talking with Burnett’s campaign aide to determine “where the money is or isn’t,” according to a Nov. 3 email from John Levin of the elections board. “Let me see if there’s a way we can do it without filing 20+ years of amended reports.”
Burnett has more than $733,000 in his Friends of Walter Burnett Jr. campaign fund, according to his most recent campaign report, Sept. 30, in which he reported he has zero investments involving contributions.
That $733,000 doesn’t include the missing $300,000 in investments he has reported making with campaign contributions since 1999, when elected officials in Illinois were first required to report any investments made with campaign cash.
Burnett’s two most recent investments were with Wintrust Bank, which holds the mortgage on Burnett’s home. Wintrust also is the landlord of Burnett’s ward office, which is in the same building as the bank’s branch at Madison Street and Western Avenue.
His campaign fund has repeatedly corrected errors in previous campaign-finance reports, including, on July 2, 2021, amending 24 quarterly reports covering six years. It said that was to eliminate a duplicate payment of $19,330 made in 2015 to the 27th Ward Regular Democratic Committee, which Burnett heads.
None of the campaign’s amended reports addressed the status of its investments.
“They’ve been making an effort to revise their reports,” says Matt Dietrich, spokesman for the Illinois State Board of Elections. “The committee has taken steps to correct past reports, and we’ll continue working with it to get accurate reports filed.”
About a month after Burnett’s campaign fund amended his reports last year, the Sun-Times reported that he and his wife had been getting property tax breaks since 2013 for homeowners on their residence and also on investment property even though Illinois law allows the homeowners exemption to be claimed only on a single, principal residence. Burnett paid $3,217 to cover property taxes owed from 2016 through 2019 on his investment property.
The Cook County assessor is allowed to go back and bill for wrongly claimed breaks only as far back as four years. County officials couldn’t say how much more the Burnetts saved from 2013 to 2015.
Burnett, 59, who represents the 27th Ward — which stretches from the Near North Side through the West Side — has the third-longest tenure of any current member of the Chicago City Council and is serving a term that expires in May. His campaign fund has continued to raise money, but he hasn’t announced whether he will seek reelection.
A protege of longtime Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, Burnett was first elected to the Chicago City Council in 1995 despite having been convicted in an armed robbery and despite a state law banning convicted felons from holding office. He subsequently got a pardon from then-Gov. Jim Edgar so he could run for reelection without fear that he might be knocked off the ballot.
