McHenry Times

With a court-ordered deadline missed, the identities of those behind vicious campaign mailers targeting McHenry County Clerk Joe Tirio in last March’s primary elections remain a mystery.

“Today was an utter disappointment,” Tirio told the McHenry Times. “Looks like we’ll be back in court on Monday at 9:00 a.m.”

On Tuesday, Circuit Court Judge Kevin Costello ordered Tirio’s primary opponent, Janice Dalton, and the Chicago printing company Breaker Press, which printed the mailers, to reveal who funded them by noon Thursday.

Joe Tirio, McHenry County Clerk

But midday on Thursday, Chicago attorney Natalie Harris, who represents Dalton and Breaker Press, asked Tirio’s lawyer, Philip Prossnitz of Woodstock for more time. By Thursday evening, Prossnitz still had “no proper names of real people” as Tirio put it.

The mailers accused Tirio of keeping a “secret taxpayer-funded slush fund” to take trips and of padding his payroll with “patronage workers.” Using language nearly identical to that on the mailers, Dalton attacked Tirio during the primary through a series of robocalls.

No evidence supported the allegations and Tirio flat-out denied them.

Print on the mailers said they were paid for by the Illinois Integrity Fund. But a visit to the address listed for the Fund at Hoffman Estates found an unoccupied office, and the fund never filed documents required by the Illinois State Board of Elections.

Once the names are made public, Tirio plans to file a defamation lawsuit, a legal action against statements considered so egregious that they are assumed to harm the plaintiff's reputation.  

“What they did was patently defamatory,” Tirio said. “Anyone who changed their vote because of them effectively had their vote stolen.”

“A certain amount of mudslinging is to be expected [in a political campaign],” Prossnitz said in an earlier statement. "But what was done here was unconscionable. Joe is a good man. We believe in the eye of the law these mailers went too far.”

Tirio said that his campaign was hit three or four times with the mailers, and that the group financed Google and Facebook ads as well. He estimated the cost of the mailers and the ads at more than $100,000, and he said they had an impact.

“I should have won by a landslide over my opponent,” he said. “She had virtually no campaign: no website, a few signs. But I won by only 3,000 votes.”