Is There a Scandal Brewing in McHenry County?

The Daily Herald has a front page story about a potential scandal that is getting attention involving McHenry County State's Attorney Louis Bianchi. We have previously written about Mr. Bianchi. On January 19, 2009 we published a blog concerning the stretching of county resources due to Mr. Bianchi's tough stance on plea agreements. Today's story about Mr. Bianchi is much different. The story started in 2007 when Bianchi's office learned that files may have been taken from the prosecutor's office. A special prosecutor was named at the time to investigate the missing files. The investigation led to the arrest of Amy Dalby, a secretary working in the prosecutors office. The former secretary claimed that she removed the files from the office because she wanted to gather proof that Bianchi was making her perform campaign work and other political duties on county time. Ms. Dalby felt that it was her civic duty to preserve the evidence to show that Bianchi was unethical. Bianchi has denied Dalby's allegations and claims they are all politically motivated. In Mr. Bianchi's defense, Dalby never went to law enforcement with any of the alleged evidence but rather turned it over to Bianchi's Republican opponent who ran an unsuccessful campaign against him last year.

Dalby was sentenced to one year of court supervision for misdemeanor computer tampering because she admitted to downloading and removing more than 5000 pages of documents from the prosecutors office. The special prosecutor is still investigating and refuses to say whether any more people will be charged with crimes.

We will keep an eye out for any more developments.

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