Frank Mautino’s Attorney files Response to Reconsideration Motion

Illinois (ECWd) –

In what appears to be a desperate attempt to spin the truth, the attorneys for Frank Mautino, our current Illinois Auditor General, have taken the position that the “Complainant has no basis to argue that the Board failed to address the allegations in the Complaint”.

No basis?  Really? 

We covered the Motion to Reconsider in this article, which made things crystal clear.

Motion to Reconsider: “despite being labeled a Final Order – did not address the Complaint’s allegations that the Committee made prohibited expenditures by paying for gas and repairs of vehicles not owned or leased by the Committee and making expenditures in excess of fair market value under 10 ILCS 5/9-8.10″

As we said in this article, “All the State Board of Election had to do was determine if Illinois Auditor General Frank Mautino reported his State Representative campaign expenditures incorrectly.”  Sadly, they failed and it’s clear Cooke’s attorneys saw the same thing we did.

Anyone that reads the complaint can see that the SBE did not address the original complaint.  They simply addressed the matters the hearing officer brought to them, at their instruction.

What has happen is the SBE failed to instruct the hearing officer to address the complaint  itself.  In fact, in the hearing between the parties in Chicago, the hearing officer made it quite clear, he was not instructed to hear anything other than the matter of ammending the reports, which the Mautino campaign refused to do.  Since they refused, he advised they willfully violated their order.

Hearing Officer: Im really looking at this from a point of view, I have an order that the State Board of Elections have asked me to conduct a public hearing on and I am going to be focusing on wether there was a violation of “that” order. (The order was to ammend the D2 filings)

All you have to do is watch the first 6 minutes of that hearing at this link to see the Hearing Officer had no interest in considering actual violations of the election code. His focus was on nothing but the order to ammend the complaints.

The fact of the matter is the SBE made a ruling on something that happened during the hearing process but have yet to ever rule on the very complaint itself, just as the Motion to Reconsider points out.

Considering the clear political divide of the State Board of Elections, we will be shocked to see them move forward on this and we suspect yet another party line vote to shoot this down and they will allow what appears to be clear violations of law to go unanswered by a person who just happens to now be the Auditor General of the State of Illinois .

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