A week before the deadline for Mayor Lori Lightfoot to answer questions under oath in a Chicago police whistleblower lawsuit, lawyers for the city are asking a judge to block the deposition.
Cook County Judge Thomas Donnelly last month ordered Lightfoot to sit for a one-hour deposition with lawyers for Chicago police Officer Isaac Lambert, who claims he was demoted by the department after he refused a superior’s request to lie to protect a fellow officer involved in the 2017 shooting of an unarmed autistic teen.
The deposition was to take place by Oct. 15, but lawyers for the city have filed a motion asking Donnelly to reverse his order from September. A hearing on the motion is set for Oct. 11.
Lightfoot will not be able to provide information relevant to Lambert’s case, city lawyers said in their motion.
“This alone should warrant protecting the mayor from an unnecessary oral interrogation, brought for no articulable reason other than to harass and inconvenience the highest elected official in the third largest city in the nation,” the filing states.
In 2016, Lightfoot chaired then Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Police Accountability Task Force, a blue-ribbon panel set up to investigate the Chicago Police Department soon after the release of video showing CPD Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times. Among the findings in a report issued in 2016 was that a “code of silence” existed within the department and was a key factor in the CPD’s inability to...
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