A vulnerable Republican incumbent battling for re-election in suburban Chicago is facing criticism this week — including a call for a federal investigation — over an e-mail message in which an aide seemingly threatened to punish Tel Aviv University because one of its top American donors was backing the Democratic challenger.
The incumbent, Rep. Mark Steven Kirk, is a member of the House Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee. The subcommittee oversees America’s foreign aid, including grants to educational institutions. Kirk has been under fire since the controversial e-mail was first reported October 26 in the Chicago Sun-Times. In the July 19 message, a Kirk aide urged Tel Aviv University’s American fundraising chief to contact the university president, Itamar Rabinovitch, and tell him to warn the donor that his support for Democratic challenger Dan Seals “can have a very bad effect on the university.” The donor, Robert Schrayer, is national chairman of the university’s American Council, its fundraising arm.
Kirk said he reprimanded the aide and warned that he would fire her if she did it again.
The stakes rose this week when a former federal judge and White House counsel, Abner Mikva, wrote to the U.S. attorney and the Cook County state’s attorney and asked for inquiries into whether the Kirk staffer, Caryn Garber, had broken any laws.
“Trying to intimidate people, especially leaders, is a serious offense,” said Mikva, a onetime Democratic congressman who represented Kirk’s 10th District in Chicago’s heavily Jewish northern suburbs. “You don’t reprimand somebody who has committed a felony,” he told the Forward.
http://www.forward.com/articles/flap-in-illinois-over-gop-threat/
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