Judicial Watch Sues Daley: Obama Jarrett Ethics Waiver: Valerie Jarret Olympic Info Withheld

Judicial Watch is suing Chicago's Mayor Daley for withholding information relating to Valerie Jarrett's "ethics waiver," which supposedly allowed her to abandon White House rules and "spearhead" Chicago's failed bid for Olympics 2016.

Barack Obama - Valerie Jarrett

Notice in the following from Jarrett, the White House wanted to be in charge. Jarrett was to be the charge-or. In the past, has a White House ever tried to engineer the Olympics, or be responsible for the Olympics? 

We wanted to have one point of contact in the White House who is responsible to make sure everything runs smoothly," she told the Tribune... "Our goal is to try to win the bid."

They failed.

Judicial Watch says Daley's "illegal" refusal to release documents is an effort to cover for President Obama, the "other side of Barack Obama's brain," Valerie Jarrett, and other White House officials.

The issue, as Judicial Watch explains it, is 

President Obama tapped White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett to lead the Olympics effort, despite her personal and business ties to Chicago, which included a stint working for Mayor Daley. The Obama White House granted Jarrett a conflict of interest "ethics waiver" to allow her to serve as "Olympics Czar," despite her having personally led the Olympics bid for Chicago before entering the White House. (Other potentially conflicted White House officials with Chicago-ties include Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Senior Advisor David Axelrod.)...

Jarrett, who previously served as vice chair of Chicago 2016, needed the waiver because the White House ethics pledge prohibits appointees from dealing with matters "substantially related" to previous employers or clients.

The Freedom of Information Act request was filed on September 5th. Daley's office did not acknowledge it until October 1, and then granted "itself" another 7 days extension. From that point on - silence from Daley until an administrative appeal was filed by Judicial Watch, with a response date of November 3rd. A Daley spokeswoman wants the scope of the documents narrowed, saying they have not seen the lawsuit, but would provide "responsive non-exempt" records.

A question: what, among the documents, should be exempt? Maybe Judicial Watch knows and that's why a law suit is pending.

Among the information the group seeks is, "[a]ll correspondence between the Office of the Mayor and President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel [sic], Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, the White House, and/or the Office of Olympic, Paralympic, and Youth Sport regarding the City of Chicago's bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics."

A clue to why Judicial Watch may be looking at improprieties might be in the opening paragraph of one of my posts about Valerie Jarrett:

How do you take a housing facility, known as a "preservation for affordable housing," bearing a $12 million mortgage, designate it for demolition, sell it to the city of Chicago for $1,000.00 and then receive $1 million from a leftist foundation in preparation for the - coming Olympics - which are not coming! Only the "other side of Barack Obama's brain," Valerie Jarrett could bring about these miraculous events.

Jarrett's company, Habitat Co., managed the Grove Parc apartments back in the days before she moved on up to the White House. Under her watch and management, Grove Parc fell into extreme disrepair, and all this happened while U.S. Senator Barack Obama represented the district where the apartment building is sitting.

Grove Parc is said to be located "in the shadows" of the proposed Olympic Village, had the Olympics come to Chicago. I don't know what "in the shadows" means, but it probably means that the Olympics Village would have been at least close enough to Grove Parc to help the area - because Valerie Jarret's management skills could not.

Jarrett is the chief executive of Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter [2008] and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems.

Boston.com on Grove Parc (read the whole article - take a look at Obama's connections):

Valerie Jarrett - Grove Parc

The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can't afford to live anywhere else.

Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama's constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.

 Not surprising Jarrett needed an "ethics waiver."