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Stories Chosen For You
Other than being able to string a sentence together, empathy is the most important quality in a speechwriter. The ability or at least the attempt to understand your audience, to walk in their shoes for a little while, even if empathy will never be a perfect match for experience.—Cody Keenan, Grace
Ten days in June 2015 were some of the most intense during the presidency of Barack Obama. The president was awaiting US Supreme Court decisions on the fate of the Affordable Care Act and marriage equality. And, on June 17, a hate-fueled white supremacist shot to death nine African American worshippers at a historic church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Chief White House speechwriter Cody Keenan focuses on this extraordinary period in his revelatory and lively new book Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America (Mariner Books).
In response to this perfect storm of historic events, Mr. Keenan drafted memorable speeches and a heartfelt and now immortal eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney and other victims of the Charleston violence. And that address moved beyond a eulogy with the president’s powerful plea for unity and reconciliation and his surprising segue as he led the congregation and the nation in singing “Amazing Grace.”
In Grace, Mr. Keenan recounts highlights of his career as a speechwriter as he describes the tumultuous ten days. The reader immediately senses the demands of working for a president who was himself the former editor of the Harvard Law Review and among the most celebrated writers and orators of the recent history. As Mr. Keenan puts it, “To be a speechwriter for Barack Obama is f---ing terrifying.” Mr. Keenan worked “to his limits” in his high-pressure position to provide President Obama with the best drafts possible. And it’s obvious from Grace that the two men were gifted collaborators who worked together with great mutual respect and admiration.
As he provides a behind-the-scenes perspective on White House operations, Mr. Keenan introduces key presidential aides such as Valerie Jarrett, Jen Psaki, Ben Rhodes, Jon Favreau and his speechwriting team. He also intersperses the book with the story of his romance with esteemed presidential fact-checker Kristen Bartoloni, who often challenged and corrected his writing. They married at the White House in 2016.
By 2015, President Obama had delivered more than a dozen eulogies for the victims of gun violence, including for those who died in the massacre where Representative Gabby Giffords was seriously wounded in Arizona and the horrific gunshot murders of 20 children and five adults in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Mr. Keenan wrote those eulogies as well as the president’s now famous speech honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 March on Selma for voting rights and those peaceful protesters including civil rights icon, Representative John Lewis, who endured a bloody attack by police.
Mr. Keenan writes powerfully of the pain and sorrow that he and the president experienced in addressing yet another mass shooting in June 2015, that time with the added dimension of racist violence. The description in Grace of the creation of the president’s address for the funeral of beloved Reverend Clementa Pinckney is a case study in collaboration in the speech drafting process.
During the same sad week, Mr. Keenan wrote statements for the president to deliver if the Supreme Court gutted the Affordable Care Act and ended marriage equality. We now know that those speeches on the Court decisions weren’t necessary. And the eulogy for Reverend Pinckney will be remembered as one of the great presidential addresses. Mr. Keenan concedes that this eulogy was his most difficult assignment after working on more than three thousand speeches for President Obama.
Mr. Keenan’s heartfelt and moving memoir Grace shows how a gifted president and his devoted team worked together tirelessly for a more fair, more tolerant, and more just nation.
Mr. Keenan is best known as an acclaimed speechwriter. He studied political science at Northwestern University and, after graduation worked in the office of US Senator Ted Kennedy. After several years in that role, he earned a master's degree in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He subsequently secured a full-time position with Barack Obama's presidential campaign in Chicago in 2008.
When President Obama took office in 2009, Mr. Keenan became deputy director of speechwriting in the White House. He was promoted to chief White House speechwriter during the president’s second term. He also collaborated with President Obama on writing projects from the end of his term in 2017 until 2020. He has said that he wrote his dream speech just four days before Obama left office—welcoming the World Champion Chicago Cubs to the White House.
Mr. Keenan is currently a partner at the speechwriting firm Fenway Strategies and, as a visiting professor at his alma mater Northwestern University, he teaches a popular course on political speechwriting. Today, he and Kristen live in New York City with their daughter, Grace.
Mr. Keenan graciously responded by email to a long series of questions on his new book and his work.
Robin Lindley: Congratulations Mr. Keenan on your engaging new book Grace, a revelatory exploration of your work as chief speechwriter for President Obama at an incredibly turbulent time. Before getting to that period, I wanted to ask about your background. You majored in political science at Northwestern University. What sparked your interest in politics?
Cody Keenan: Well, I enrolled at Northwestern as a pre-med student. I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon after a football injury forced a knee reconstruction. Chemistry 101 weeded me right out, though. I just wanted to take biology.
But politics had always been an interest. My parents often argued about politics at the dinner table – my mom was a Kennedy Democrat from Indiana; my dad was a Reagan Republican from California – and whatever could make them so animated was something worth exploring. One value they both hammered into me, though, was the idea that I should do whatever I could to make sure more people had the same kind of opportunities I did growing up – and by the time I graduated from college, only one political party cared about that.
Robin Lindley: Did you have academic or other training in speechwriting?
Cody Keenan: No. Writing was something that always came naturally, and I think that came from being a voracious reader. I won every summer competition at the local public library. You can’t be a good writer without being a great reader.
Robin Lindley: You interned for legendary Senator Ted Kennedy after college. Did your duties in that role include speechwriting?
Cody Keenan: Not as part of the internship, or even the first position after that. Three months as an intern got me hired to answer his phones. I ended up working for him for almost four years in four different roles.
In 2004, when I was on his staff for the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, the Democratic National Convention was in Boston, his hometown. We all took a week off work to volunteer. I was on the arena floor the night that Barack Obama gave the speech that made him famous. He walked into the arena anonymous; he walked out 17 minutes later a global megastar. It shows you what a good speech can do.
Once we were back in Washington, I must have talked about that speech a lot, because that’s when my boss asked if I could write a speech. I don’t know if he meant did I have the time or did I know how, but it didn’t matter – I lied and said yes.
Robin Lindley: Senator Kennedy was known as a great legislator in the Senate who could work across the aisle. Did you work with him or his staff on any significant projects? What did you learn from that internship?
Cody Keenan: As an intern, one of my tasks was to read and route mail that came to the office. Perfect strangers were writing a senator – often one who wasn’t even their senator – to ask for help. There’s an act of hope involved in that. Even when it was a tough letter to read, even when you could see that the writer had wiped a tear from the page, they hoped that someone on the other end would care enough to help. I learned right away just how important this stuff is.
Later, as a staffer, I worked on all sorts of legislation. Kennedy was involved in everything. Health care, minimum wage, education, immigration, the Iraq War, the response to Hurricane Katrina, Supreme Court nominations – we were always busy. And with good mentors, I learned that just as important as the policy itself was often the way you communicated it.
Robin Lindley: What attracted you to working for President Obama during his first presidential campaign in 2007? Did you work as a speechwriter before his election?
Cody Keenan: Well, what struck me about that 2004 speech was that he described politics the way I wanted it to be – as this collective endeavor in which we could do extraordinary things that we couldn’t do alone. His only speechwriter at the time, Jon Favreau, called me early in the campaign and asked if I wanted to join the speechwriting team he was putting together. I said yes.
Robin Lindley: What did you learn or do to prepare for work as a speechwriter for President Obama, one of our most celebrated American writers and thinkers even then? Did you go back and read works of some of the great White House writers such as Ted Sorensen, Bill Moyers, and Peggy Noonan? Did you read speeches by the likes of Lincoln, FDR, JFK, Churchill, and other memorable leaders?
Cody Keenan: I didn’t. I’d already read the canon of presidential hits, but to be a speechwriter for someone means writing for that specific person, helping him or her sound not like anybody else, but rather the best version of himself or herself.
Robin Lindley: I read that you didn’t personally meet President Obama until his first day at the White House in 2009. Yet, you had been working for him for a year and a half. What do you remember about your first meeting and your early days at the White House?
Cody Keenan: Yep – he visited Chicago headquarters maybe three times during the campaign. He was out campaigning! And when he did visit, it was for strategy sessions with his top aides and to address the entire staff at once, not to meet with his most junior speechwriter.
On our first day at the White House, he called me into the Oval Office because he’d seen my name at the top of speech drafts and he just wanted to put a face to the name. Those early days were drinking from a firehose: the economy was falling apart, millions of Americans had lost their jobs and their homes in just the four months before he took office, and millions more would in the first few months after. There was no honeymoon; we were busy trying to turn that firehose onto the fire.
Robin Lindley: Did you immediately start as a speechwriter once President Obama began work at the White House?
Cody Keenan: I did.
Robin Lindley: How does one prepare for a job that requires knowing the voice and propensities of the person they are writing for?
Cody Keenan: Well, I had a year and a half foundation from the campaign. I’d read his books to absorb his worldview, listened to the audio versions to absorb his cadence, and paid close attention to his edits. He was a writer. He was our chief speechwriter. And he was our top editor. I learned a lot just by poring over his edits to our drafts.
Robin Lindley: How did your relationship with President Obama evolve over his eight years in office? You wrote that working for this acclaimed writer could be terrifying. It seems he offered good advice to you such as having a drink and listening to Miles Davis or John Coltrane. Or reading James Baldwin. Did you see him as a kind of coach or mentor?
Cody Keenan: I was the junior writer on the team for the first two years, sitting across the driveway in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Then a series of high-profile speeches got me promoted to deputy director of speechwriting, and I moved into a West Wing office with Jon Favreau. Once he left after the second inaugural, I took over as chief speechwriter. So naturally, our relationship evolved – I went from seeing Obama every couple weeks to every week to every day.
I saw him as my boss. I guess as a writing coach of sorts. And sometimes even as an uncle or older brother who loved to dispense advice. He hosted my wife and our families and our best friends at the White House on our wedding day. It was his idea. He didn’t have to do that.
Robin Lindley: Are there other bits of President Obama’s advice that stick with you?
Cody Keenan: “Don’t impart motives to people.” That’s advice we could use more of.
Robin Lindley: Indeed. A big question, but can you give a sense of the speechwriting process? What sparks the process? Who is involved? What’s it like to collaborate with a team of writers and other staff?
Cody Keenan: He viewed speechwriting as a collaboration. He just wanted us to give him something he could work with. We wrote 3,477 speeches and statements in the White House, and believe it or not, he edited most of the speeches, even if lightly. But he couldn’t be deeply involved with all of them.
For any speech of consequence, though, we’d start by sitting down with him and asking “what’s the story we’re trying to tell?” Then the speechwriting team would talk over each speech, helping each other get started. Then we’d all go back to our own laptops and draft whatever speech we’d been assigned. The drafting was not a collaborative process. The revising was – with each other, but more importantly with him.
Robin Lindley: What’s the fact checking process for a speech draft before it goes to the president? It’s interesting that your future wife Kristen was one of the very diligent fact-checkers you relied on.
Cody Keenan: Yeah, she literally got paid to tell me I was wrong. Every day. For years. It was her team’s job to fireproof the president – to make sure he never said something he shouldn’t, with someone he shouldn’t be with, at a place he shouldn’t be visiting. They prevented countless alternate timelines where we’d have to do some cleanup in the press. They saved us from ourselves again and again.
Robin Lindley: Congratulations on your marriage to Kristen with the magnificent White House wedding. Your blossoming romance runs like a red thread through your book. You note that President Obama would stay up late at night to review and edit drafts of speeches he would give the next day. And you often received late night calls from him or met with him in the wee hours. How did those final hours work with a speech? It seems the president would often edit to the time of delivery.
Cody Keenan: He always edited in the wee hours of the morning. It’s when he preferred to work. It was rare that we were editing right up until delivery. If we were flying somewhere for a speech, he’d always go over it one or two final times on the plane. But he didn’t like chaos. In fact, the reason he edited so heavily, so often, was because he wanted the speech exactly the way he wanted it. Sometimes it was perfectionism. But it’s really just preparation.
Robin Lindley: What did you think when the president ad libbed or changed something from your draft as he spoke? I think you said something to the effect that he was a better speechwriter than all of his writing staff.
Cody Keenan: I loved it. I can’t think of a time I cringed at an adlib. He had a knack for it. It could be a little white-knuckled if he did it at the end of the speech when there’s no text for him to come back to. In that case, he’d have to build a new runway while he was speaking on which to land the plane.
Robin Lindley: When does humor come into the mix? Do you write for events such as the White House Correspondents Dinner? President Obama had some zingers for his eventual birther successor at these events.
Cody Keenan: Those were our most collaborative sets of remarks. The entire team would pitch jokes, and we’d reach out to professional comedy writers to solicit their help. We’d start out with about 200 jokes and whittle them down to the 20 funniest. Sometimes, none of your jokes would make the cut. You’ve got to have a thick skin.
Robin Lindley: And you and the other speechwriters did not use a template such as this speech is on the economy or this speech is political, so we’ll use the file template X or Y. You were responsible for more than three thousand speeches, yet it seems each speech was approached as a unique project.
Cody Keenan: Yes and no. We never used a template. But while each individual speech should tell a story, so should all speeches. What I mean by that is, we were mindful that every speech we wrote fit into a longer narrative arc – both of his presidency and his entire political career.
Robin Lindley: You worked for the president through his eight years in office. How did you come to focus on ten days in 2015 in Grace as the president dealt with the horrific 2015 mass murder of nine Black parishioners by an avowed white supremacist at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The president then also was preparing to address two impending Supreme Court decisions that would determine the fate of the Affordable Care Act and marriage equality.
Cody Keenan: Yeah. People will remember all of the stories and all of the events in this book. They won’t remember that they all happened in the same ten-day span. I mean, that in and of itself is a story that demands to be told. In addition to a massacre carried out by a self-radicalized white supremacist, there was a very real chance that the Supreme Court would say no, people who work two or three jobs don’t deserve help affording health insurance; no, gay Americans don’t get to get married like the rest of us; all of those people are now second-class citizens. And the first Black president has to serve as the public narrator and provide some moral clarity for all of this.
Someone once described it as ten days too implausible for an entire season of The West Wing. But it’s also what those events symbolized and how they fit in the broader, centuries-long story of America – whether or not we’re actually going to live up to the ideals we profess to believe in. Whether we’re going to stand up to white supremacy, and bigotry, and people who profit from inequality and violence. And that week, the answers were all “yes.”
Robin Lindley: With the Charleston massacre, the president had to address another mass shooting and he was tired of giving eulogies after the murders at Sandy Hook and all of the other heartbreaking mass shootings during his term in office. How was his speech at Mother Emmanuel Church different from previous addresses? What was your role in creating this memorable speech? How did the speech go beyond a eulogy to become a message of reconciliation?
Cody Keenan: We had done over a dozen eulogies after mass shootings at that point. And this goes back a few years, the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 little kids were murdered in their classrooms, along with six of their educators, was right after he’d been reelected.
And he put aside his second term agenda right out of the gate to try to do something about guns, because what an abdication of leadership that would be if he didn’t. And he had a little boost by Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey, an arch conservative from Pennsylvania with an A-rating from the NRA. They both had one. They decided to work together on a background checks bill. And even though we knew the odds in the Senate would be long, that gives you something to try for. And so, we traveled the country for a few months. He made it a centerpiece of his State of the Union address. Big, emotional, powerful ending. And in the end, in April, Republicans blocked a vote on it with the parents of the Newtown kids watching from the gallery.
And that’s about as cynical as I’ve ever seen Barack Obama. Yet he went out and spoke in the Rose Garden with those families. I handed him a draft of the speech and he said, look out, I'm going to use this as a as a template, but I’m just going to wing it. And he came in after that speech into the outer Oval Office, which is this room just off the oval where his assistants sit, and he was almost yelling once the door closed, he said, “what am I going to do the next time this happens? What am I going to say? I don’t want to speak. If we’ve decided as a country that we’re not going to do anything about this, then I don’t want to be the one who closes the cycle every time with a eulogy that gives the country permission to move on.”
Ultimately, we did decide to do a eulogy after Charleston, and it was his idea to build the structure of the speech around the lyrics to “Amazing Grace.”
Robin Lindley: I think everyone was surprised and moved when President Obama sang “Amazing Grace” during the Charleston speech. Were you surprised or was that part of the plan for the speech?
Cody Keenan: That, too, was his idea. He told me on Marine One that morning that, if it felt right in the arena, he might sing it.
Robin Lindley: You now teach speechwriting at your alma mater Northwestern University. Do you have any other advice for prospective speech writers?
Cody Keenan: It’s fun, training a new generation of speechwriters and trying to convince them that public service is worth it. What I didn’t expect was that my students would end up teaching me quite a bit in return. There’s an impatience to their generation that mine didn’t have to have. Politics and the pace of change is now existential for them in a way it hasn’t been since schoolkids were doing duck and cover drills during the Cold War. They’re doing those duck and cover drills again because of guns. They can see an end to their future because of climate change.
And let me tell you, when they see a party more into policing books than policing assault weapons; when they see a party more exercised about drag queens than about climate change – they feel a real disdain there. I want them to harness it, though, in a productive way. And part of that means telling them the truth. To tell them that change has always taken time isn’t fun. To tell them that they’re not always going to win isn’t fun. To tell them that even when they vote in every election, they’ll never elect a leader who delivers everything they want. Well, that’s just not inspiring. But it’s also true.
Nobody ever promised us these things. That’s democracy. But here’s the thing about democracy: we get to refresh it whenever we want. Older generations aren’t entitled to their full tenure. So, while I counsel patience and realism, I also fan the flames of their impatience and idealism. I tell them to join a campaign now, to start an advocacy group now, to run for office now. Stay at it not just until the people in power are more representative of what America actually is, but until they’re the ones in power themselves. Then make the system your own. Faster, smarter, more responsive to the needs of a modern, pluralistic democracy. And one way to do that is through my cardinal rule of speechwriting: help more leaders talk like actual human beings.
Robin Lindley: You also continue to work as a speechwriter and you note that you worked with President Obama after his tenure in office. Did you consult with the president on writing projects such as his monumental memoir Promised Land?
Cody Keenan: I worked for him full-time for four years after we left the White House, ultimately leaving after the 2020 election so that I could devote my time to writing Grace.
Robin Lindley: What sorts of clients do your work with as a speechwriter now?
Cody Keenan: All kinds. Progressive candidates, nonprofit, academic, and corporate. Our rule is that each client has to be putting more into the world – hopefully much more – than it’s taking out. But the best part of it is to be surrounded by a team of idealistic young speechwriters again. I missed that over the four years after the White House.
Robin Lindley: Would you consider working with a president at the White House again?
Cody Keenan: Maybe. Depends on who it is. For a speechwriter, it really, really depends on who it is. Speeches require a deeper relationship than a lot of other staff positions. But I’m also older and have a young daughter. Both of those things make the grind of the White House much less attractive.
Robin Lindley: It seems we’re more divided now than during the Obama years. I never thought I’d see Nazi rallies in America in the 21st century. Where do you find hope for our democracy at this fraught time?
Cody Keenan: My students. While politics as it is may make them cynical, they’re not cynical about America and its possibilities. Somehow, they’re not as plagued by fear or suspicion as older generations; they’re more tolerant of differences between race and culture and gender and orientation, not only comfortable navigating all these different worlds but impatient to make them all fairer, more inclusive, and just plain better. They’re consumed with the idea that they can change things. They just want to do it faster.
Robin Lindley: Is there anything you’d like to add for readers about your book or your work?
Cody Keenan: You’re going to love Grace. I wrote it because it’s a hell of a story and it’s the most intimate look at Obama’s approach to speechwriting that exists.
But I also wrote it, as I told Stephen Colbert when he had me on, to blow up people’s cynicism about our politics. Because politics isn’t some rigid system we’re trapped under. It’s us. It’s only as good as we are. That’s why I was so happy when Obama called it “an antidote to cynicism that will make you believe again.”
But I was just as happy to read a review that described it this way: “Grace is a refreshing departure from the flood of scandalous ‘literary’ flotsam that typically washes up in the wake of the transfer of power. This book might not make breaking-news headlines, but it just might restore a little faith in the presidency and the backstage men and women who work around the clock to fulfill the chief executive’s promises to the American people.” The publicist at the publishing house didn’t love the part about “breaking-news headlines,” because that’s what sells books – but I was proud to write it the way I did. There’s no sleazy tell-all in this book, but there are a bunch of great never-before-told stories about what it’s like to sit alone with Obama and unlock the right words for a fraught moment.
Robin Lindley: Thank you Cody for your generosity and thoughtful comments. Your book captures the reality of work in the tense and often exhilarating environment of the White House with a president who was devoted to creating a more just and tolerant nation. Best wishes on your continuing work and congratulations on Grace.
Robin Lindley is a Seattle-based attorney, writer, illustrator, and features editor for the History News Network (historynewsnetwork.org). His work also has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle, Bill Moyers.com, Re-Markings, Salon.com, Crosscut, Documentary, ABA Journal, Huffington Post, and more. Most of his legal work has been in public service. He served as a staff attorney with the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations and investigated the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His writing often focuses on the history of human rights, social justice, conflict, medicine, visual culture, and art. Robin’s email: robinlindley@gmail.com.
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This cop got out of 44 tickets by saying over and over that his girlfriend stole his car
June 03, 2023
Each time he stood before a Chicago traffic court judge and told his story, the judge asked his name.
“Jeffrey Kriv,” he’d say. That was true.
Then he’d raise his right hand and get sworn in. What came next was also consistent.
“Well, that morning, I broke up with my girlfriend and she stole my car,” Kriv, who had been ticketed for running a red light, testified in January 2021.
“Yeah, I broke up with my girlfriend earlier that morning, had a knock-down, drag-out fight, verbally, of course. She took my car without my knowledge,” he told a different judge when fighting a speeding ticket in August 2021.
“I broke up with my girlfriend that day and she took my car without my knowledge. … I didn’t get my car back for like three days. But it was her driving the car,” he said while contesting a speeding ticket, once again under oath, in May 2022.
The excuse worked, just as it had many times before.
At the ticket hearings, Kriv often provided what he said were legitimate police incident reports as evidence of the car thefts; they had officer names and badge numbers, and he explained that he got the reports at police headquarters.
But Kriv did not let on that he, himself, was a Chicago cop.
As bold as he was when fighting his tickets, he was equally brazen in his professional life. He attracted a remarkable number of complaints from citizens he encountered — and even from other officers. And just as he did in his personal life, he defended himself vigorously against the allegations.
Kriv doesn’t register as one of Chicago’s most notorious corrupt cops — those who tortured suspects for confessions or shook down drug dealers. But his on-duty conduct regularly flouted rules and disrupted lives. Once, he punched a handcuffed man in the back of his patrol car, records show.
But given Chicago’s long-standing and dramatic shortcomings in police discipline, none of his on-duty misconduct cost him his badge and gun.
It took a tip to an outside agency and questions about Kriv’s testimony as a private citizen in traffic court to unravel his career.
A spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department would not comment for this story or answer any questions.
A lawyer for Kriv, informed of the reporting by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune, said “many of the facts you compose are incomplete or not true,” though he did not say what was inaccurate. The lawyer, Tim Grace, said that Kriv had received nearly 150 commendations and recognitions and had earned two awards for saving lives.
“Officer Kriv has served his city with honor for over 25-plus years,” Grace said.
His Troubles Began Almost Immediately
In 1996, Kriv was sworn in as a Chicago police officer. The first complaint about him came about eight months later, while Kriv was still a probationary hire. A man said Kriv broke his car window with a flashlight while directing traffic; Kriv was not disciplined in that incident.
Supervisors reprimanded him a few months later, however, after Kriv failed to notice there was a marijuana cigarette on the back seat of his squad car.
But there was more to come, records show: being rude, offensive or physically abusive; flipping someone off; and writing in a police report that one woman was “white trash” and a “raving lunatic.”
He was held in contempt of court and arrested after he flung papers into the air and called the judge’s ruling “a joke.” He apologized in court the next day, and the contempt charge was vacated. An assistant deputy superintendent recommended against removing his police powers after the incident, records show. In another case, a different judge ordered him removed from a courtroom after he wouldn’t stop talking.
Most officers face only a handful of complaints over the course of their careers. But at least 92 misconduct complaints were filed against Kriv, according to city and police disciplinary records compiled and analyzed by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica. Even more exceptional: About 28% of complaints against Kriv were found to have merit, compared with about 4% of complaints against all Chicago police officers going back decades.
In 2005, after a city Streets and Sanitation Department employee towed his illegally parked personal car, Kriv sent a letter via the city’s interoffice mail system threatening to ticket the cars of Streets and Sanitation workers in retaliation. He was suspended for 20 days. In 2006, he left the scene of a vehicle fire he had responded to, removed the numbers that identified his squad car and went into a strip club to visit a waitress, according to internal police investigation records. He was issued a 90-day suspension that was later knocked down to 45 days.
In 2009, Kriv was accused of punching a woman whom he’d arrested after seeing her arguing with her husband on the street. The woman was found not guilty at trial on charges of domestic battery and resisting arrest.
“I had to have surgery. I had to have plastic implanted under my eye because of this,” said Jessie Wangeman, who lives in Indianapolis. “My face is not symmetrical anymore. He really messed me up on the outside. And inside it was a really traumatic experience.”
Wangeman sued Kriv and the city of Chicago over the encounter; the city paid her $100,000 to settle in 2011. Wangeman declined to talk with investigators looking into Kriv’s alleged misconduct, and Kriv wasn’t disciplined.
Meanwhile, Kriv’s personal vehicles — a BMW sedan and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle — were ticketed 22 times between 2008 and 2013. He paid some of those tickets, records show.
At a traffic court hearing in December 2013, Kriv used the girlfriend alibi for the first time, authorities now allege.
“May I ask you why you’re contesting this ticket, Mr. Kriv?” the judge asked.
“Yes, my ex-girlfriend, well, took my car two days prior after I broke up with her. I filed a police report that it was stolen and they recovered it approximately a week after the fact,” he testified. “Here’s the police report that was done. I did have her arrested approximately three weeks ago and I got a court date coming up in January.”
The judge reviewed the report and dismissed the ticket.
False Statements and False Arrests
Kriv was investigated at least 26 times over allegations of dishonesty as a police officer. That included accusations of falsifying records, writing unwarranted tickets, performing improper searches, making false arrests.
One man accused Kriv of writing him false parking citations. A woman complained that Kriv issued her eight baseless citations in two weeks while her vehicle was parked in an assigned space on private property. And another man made two other complaints accusing Kriv of repeatedly writing tickets to him at his business as a way to harass him. Department investigators concluded that Kriv wrote unwarranted tickets to that man; investigations into the other allegations could not be pursued because the accusers did not sign formal complaints.
As a cop, Kriv’s specialty was DUI enforcement. He made more DUI arrests in Chicago than any other officer in 2021, and he topped the list statewide the same year, according to one anti-drunken-driving group.
But one woman sued him over her 2015 drunken driving arrest after she was acquitted at trial. The lawsuit alleged that Kriv falsely arrested her and made false statements against her. Kriv denied the allegations.
“He would lie under oath for a piece of bubble gum,” the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from Kriv, told a reporter.
The woman later dropped the lawsuit because she said Kriv was disparaging and intimidating her.
Even outside of his job and his chutzpah in traffic court, Kriv’s history is notable.
While Kriv was growing up in Highland Park, his father, an attorney, funded a messy fraud scheme, survived an assassination attempt meant to silence him about it, and was sent to federal prison for a second fraud racket that involved sending falsified accident claims through the mail, according to court records at the National Archives. Kriv’s father testified at trial in the first fraud case and did not face charges for his role in that scheme.
Kriv then attended the University of Iowa for six years. A university spokesperson said he never graduated — though he claimed that he had in an application for another city job in 2013. Kriv’s attorney did not respond to a question about his educational history.
When Kriv was in his late 20s, the unemployment insurance division of the Illinois attorney general’s office sued him to recoup about $3,800 in benefits for which the government claimed he wasn’t eligible, records show. Details about what led to the attorney general’s claim are missing from court files, and there’s no public record of how it was resolved.
Neither the Police Department nor the city’s human resources division could locate Kriv’s initial application to the Police Department, so it’s unclear how much hiring officials knew about his background.
It’s also unclear whether the department knew how often Kriv was being ticketed for traffic violations — nine times in 2014 alone, records show. He got all of those tickets dismissed, including a speeding ticket issued in the fall for going 21 miles an hour over the speed limit near a school.
“My ex-girlfriend stole my car,” Kriv told the judge. “There is this police report over here that was done and, a matter of fact, I had another ticket I contested last week … another speed camera.
“They only charged her with trespassing because it was my girlfriend. She stole my key and racked up all these tickets here.”
The judge reviewed the report and dismissed the ticket.
When Other Cops Complained
Kriv’s conduct as a cop stands out in yet another way: Even other cops complained about him.
Internal affairs records show that a police lieutenant filed a complaint against Kriv in 2016 accusing Kriv of failing to arrest an off-duty sergeant who was involved in a crash, even though the sergeant was unsteady, was slurring his speech and had urinated in his pants — “wasted,” according to a police report. Kriv was suspended for 15 days for violating five department rules in that incident.
His police partner once reported that he made her get out of their squad car after an argument, forcing her to walk more than a half-mile back to their station. Investigators concluded there wasn’t enough evidence in that case to discipline Kriv.
In 2014, supervisors — including the head of the DUI task force that Kriv was on — filed a complaint against Kriv alleging that he disobeyed commands from a higher-ranking officer and impounded a car without justification after a traffic crash.
Over the other officers’ objections, Kriv declared that the driver of the car involved in the crash was drunk, handcuffed him, and put him in the back of his squad car, according to accounts from the driver, Jaime Garcia, and other officers. He also ordered Garcia’s Nissan Altima towed and impounded.
“He kept telling me, ‘I know you’re drunk, I know you’re drunk.’ I didn’t know what to do, I was in shock, I was scared,” Garcia said in an interview.
The officers on the scene filed the complaint against Kriv.
“For some reason, he was trying to put a false arrest on this guy. I apologized to him, said, ‘Sorry you had to go through this.’ I told him about filing a complaint,” said retired Lt. David Blanco, the supervisor that night. After its investigation, the department acknowledged Kriv was wrong to have impounded Garcia’s car, knowing there would be no DUI charges against him.
Kriv ultimately wasn’t disciplined for his behavior that night, once again benefiting from the Police Department’s feeble accountability system, which has long been marked by delays, red tape and lax punishment.
Though he regularly escaped punishment altogether for alleged misconduct on the job, in some cases, he was reprimanded or received suspensions of between one and 45 days. The department suspended Kriv at least 20 times for 170 days total, according to a Tribune-ProPublica analysis of his disciplinary records.
One citizen told the investigating agency that Kriv was unconcerned when he threatened to file a complaint. Kriv, the man said, told him that complaints “are not going to go anywhere,” no matter how many an officer was facing. The man’s complaint was closed after he declined to participate in the investigation.
Kriv appealed disciplinary decisions at least eight times over his career, including through the department’s grievance system. A 2017 investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica found that 85% of disciplinary cases handled through the department’s grievance process since 2010 had led to officers receiving shorter suspensions or, in many cases, having their punishments overturned entirely.
“It doesn’t hurt to grieve it. Why wouldn’t I?” Kriv told the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica for that story.
Kriv got a five-day suspension reduced to a reprimand, another five-day suspension reduced to two days, and a 90-day suspension — for going to the strip club while on duty — cut in half.
“It sounds to me like several of these cases — each of them standing on its own, independently — should have triggered a discharge case,” said Mark Iris, who until 2004 was the executive director of the Chicago Police Board, the civilian body that decides disciplinary cases involving Chicago officers. He also studied the use of mathematical analysis to prevent police misconduct and taught at Northwestern University.
“The unit commanders had to have known this guy was a headache,” Iris said in an interview.
Records show the department never tried to fire Kriv.
Blanco, like many of the people Kriv encountered, said he doesn’t get how Kriv remained on the force.
“That’s what I couldn’t understand — with all the suspensions, why they didn’t get rid of this guy. There’s obviously a red light flashing over this guy’s head,” Blanco told ProPublica and the Tribune.
During Kriv’s career, the Chicago Police Department had eight superintendents, three iterations of an independent police investigation body and at least two versions of an internal affairs division. The Police Department has stalled on at least two attempts to implement an early-warning system to spot problem behavior.
In its 2019 consent decree with the Justice Department, the Police Department agreed to develop a system to identify officers at risk of misconduct, alert their supervisors and provide training. That system still has not been implemented, according to the latest consent decree update.
In addition, for most of Kriv’s career, the police union’s contract with the department allowed investigators to consider only the most recent five years of an officer’s disciplinary history. (The current union contract eliminates that requirement). That meant that even officers with extensive histories of misconduct could have looked problem-free when department leaders weighed discipline options.
As a result, when investigators in 2013 looked into a complaint against Kriv, his recent disciplinary history was clean, so they proceeded as if he’d never been disciplined. The truth was that, by then, he had been suspended or reprimanded for at least 15 different incidents, but the most recent complaints were more than five years old or didn’t appear on his record yet because they were still under investigation.
As Kriv successfully appealed Police Department discipline, he also was successfully beating more and more traffic tickets.
From 2015 through mid-2022, Kriv got 51 tickets but paid only two.
Other tickets — issued for reasons including exceeding the speed limit by at least 11 miles an hour, running red lights, blocking an area and parking where he shouldn’t — were dismissed.
He got some tickets dismissed by making technical arguments — claiming a ticket wasn’t filled out properly, for example — but most were dismissed after he blamed his girlfriend, records show.
Kriv contested tickets using that defense before at least 23 different judges. Sometimes he went before the same judge with the same story, but those appearances were typically years apart.
At a hearing in 2018, he tried to get out of a speeding ticket issued in a school zone.
“My girlfriend and I got in an argument that morning,” he told the judge. “We broke up. She took my fob and she took my car and I do have a police report.”
“I didn’t get it back until later that night around 9 o’clock. And I did have her arrested about a week later. We went to her workplace, but here’s a copy of the police report.”
The judge reviewed the report and dismissed the ticket.
“The System’s Like a Joke”
Citywide, it’s rare for people to succeed in getting their tickets dismissed. In a typical year, the city issues about 1 million automated-camera tickets for speeding and red-light violations. People contest about 4% of those tickets, and about 1 in 10 win, according to an analysis of city ticket data.
There’s no indication the Police Department knew how often Kriv was contesting his tickets in court. There’s also no indication in records that the girlfriend he used as his alibi was real.
Last year, the city’s Office of Inspector General received a tip to look at Kriv — not for his work in uniform, but for a potentially fraudulent defense of a parking ticket he had received, records show.
The OIG followed that tip and concluded that Kriv had provided false testimony and fraudulent documentation related to parking and traffic violations since 2009, according to prosecutors. Since 2013, he had contested 44 tickets by saying his girlfriend had stolen his car. All 44 had been dismissed.
The office notified the Police Department that it was investigating Kriv.
The Cook County state’s attorney’s office in October barred Kriv from testifying in court as a witness, placing him on a list of police officers whose truthfulness is in question. Nonetheless, the police department kept him on the streets and he continued to write tickets and make DUI arrests.
The final time Kriv took an oath to tell the truth and then blamed his girlfriend for a speeding ticket was in September of 2022, records show. Once again, the story worked.
“Well, I had her arrested,” Kriv said when the judge asked what happened to the woman. “They charged her with a misdemeanor trespassing to a vehicle. That pretty much went nowhere.
“She got, like, three months’ supervision or something like that. It’s kind of a, I don’t want to say the system’s like a joke, but it didn’t really do anything.”
As Kriv, who is 56, was defending himself in traffic court last year, he also was eyeing retirement, going back and forth with the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago to sort out his pension benefits. He was told he’d gain another year of seniority — and a larger pension — if he stayed on the force until Jan. 15.
On Jan. 12, the department collected his badge and stripped him of police powers.
On Jan. 14, Kriv got another speeding ticket.
On Jan. 17, Kriv retired.
The next day, Kriv’s car was ticketed again for speeding.
On Jan. 31, Cook County prosecutors charged Kriv with four counts of perjury and five counts of forgery, all of them felonies, for allegedly lying to judges under oath and providing fictitious police reports in four traffic ticket cases.
The girlfriend story, prosecutors allege, was fake. Prosecutors calculated that, by getting out of 44 tickets, Kriv saved himself $3,665.
The state’s attorney’s office declined to comment about its case against Kriv.
Kriv emailed the pension board the day after he was charged and released on $10,000 bond, writing: “When do I start getting my pension checks and does it come bi-weekly or once a month?” His pension started at about $6,000 a month, according to the board.
Deborah Witzburg, the inspector general whose office helped build the case against Kriv, declined to comment for this story. In a news release about the charges, she said: “The truthfulness and credibility of police officers is foundational to the fair administration of justice, and to CPD’s effectiveness as a law enforcement agency.”
Grace, Kriv’s attorney, noted that the criminal charges are not related to his duties as a police officer. “He understands the importance of accountability by all citizens when it comes to paying his outstanding tickets and looks forward to resolving this matter by making good on any oversights he may have,” Grace said.
In late March, a Cook County judge called out, “Jeffrey Kriv,” and the former officer stepped forward to be arraigned. He pleaded not guilty. Each offense is punishable by up to five years in prison.
When reached by phone, Kriv said he didn’t want to talk because “nobody gets a fair shake with the media” and his attorney had advised him not to say anything.
“When it is all said and done, this will be dismissed,” he said. “There is nothing to it.”
Kriv got three more speeding tickets soon after he retired in mid-January. He didn’t contest any of them, and he paid the fines.
Then he got three more speeding tickets.
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'No longer the Lord's chicken': 'Christian woman' says she's 'grieving' over 'woke' Chick-fil-A
June 03, 2023
A self-described "Christian woman" who is a contributor to the far-right wing students organization Turning Point USA, is being widely mocked for posting a video attacking Chick-fil-A over claims the conservative, privately-owned, faith-based fast food restaurant chain recently hired a diversity officer.
"So I'm grieving," the video, apparently by Morgonn McMichael (below), begins. "It's lunchtime. I'm here with Aubrey. And we really wanted some Chick-fil-A but because they decided to hire a diversity, equity and inclusion corporate position, and also bow down to the woke lord because their ESG scores, and also I found out do you know their chicken is funded by BlackRock and Vanguard? Yeah their farms, they use Tyson and this other farm, BlackRock and Vanguard funded chicken."
If you think that's a mouthful just wait, there's more.
"Chick-fil-A," Morgonn continues, "you are no longer the Lord's chicken. You're actually the woke chicken and I'm really upset about it as a Christian woman. All we wanted was some good fried chicken so now we're gonna go to Cane's, we're going to try it out."
READ MORE: Classified Pentagon ‘War Plans’ Document Trump Bragged About in Audio Recording Is Missing: Report
Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers is a Louisiana-based fast food restaurant with 600 locations in the U.S. and Western Asia.
"This is really difficult because there's a Chick-fil-A is across the street. Now eating chicken fingers instead of chicken nuggets. I know, first world Christian woman problems, but no one will ever understand the love that I had for Chick-fil-A."
"You know, we're taking this boycott Chick-fil-A thing seriously, and it's really difficult."
The video was posted to Twitter by the anonymous group PatriotTakes, which has been described as a liberal political action committee. It quickly went viral, garnering over 2 million views in just eight hours. Late Friday afternoon Morgonn tweeted, "sarcasm and satire are things the left doesn't seem to understand."
For those who don't know, Turning Point USA, a far-right Christian nationalist organization, was founded by the ultra-MAGA Charlie Kirk, now a member of the highly-secretive Council for National Policy.
CNP's membership list also includes former Trump attorney, ally, and advisor Cleta Mitchell, and Ginni Thomas.
"CNP members range from the leaders of the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, to the Southern Poverty Law Center designated anti-LGBTQ hate groups Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom," Documented reported last year.
Turning Point USA was in the news last week after Rolling Stone reported: "Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA Teamed Up With a Registered Sex Offender."
Meanwhile, over at TPUSA, Morgonn McMichael's bio says she is "a Gen Z social media influencer from Texas whose effort to empower and inspire America’s next generation of young conservative female leaders through patriotic online video content has amassed over 100,000 unique social media impressions every week on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and more."
"Morgonn has dedicated the last year promoting freedom of speech, religious liberty, personal responsibility, and limited government both online and across TPUSA campus chapters. Morgonn has also reached tens of thousands of viewers of all ages with her articles and appearances on Newsmax, Real America’s Voice, OAN, and Breitbart, offering insightful cultural commentary into the most pressing issues concerning young conservatives today."
Apparently, Chick-fil-A's diversity officer (more on that next) is one of "the most pressing issues concerning young conservatives today."
Morgonn did claim Chick-fil-A "decided to hire a diversity, equity and inclusion" officer.
Well, stunningly, the company – long known for its hate-filled attacks on same-sex marriage – did, over a year ago.
A USA Today fact check found Chick-fil-A hired Erick McReynolds, its vice president of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, more than a year and a half ago. The company even has a DEI page featuring him on its corporate website.
PatriotTakes also tweeted, "TPUSA Contributor Morgonn, who is now calling for a boycott of Chick-fil-a, previously said, Cancel culture is toxic' and 'needs to be canceled.'"
As some social media users pointed out, Cane's Chicken Fingers is very pro-LGBTQ.
"Since its inception in the early 2000s, Raising Cane’s has been a strong supporter of the LGBT community," San Diego Gay & Lesbian News (SDGLN) reported in November. "The chicken chain was one of the first companies to offer domestic partner benefits to its employees and has been a vocal advocate for LGBT rights. In 2015, Raising Cane’s was named one of the best places to work for LGBT Equality by the Human Rights Campaign."
In response to Morgonn's video, Mississippi Free Press editor Ashton Pittman posted this screenshot from a Raising Cane's tweet:
Does she know? https://t.co/JWFCMZmdYB pic.twitter.com/sjyvvKRMPL
— Ashton Pittman 🏳️🌈 (@ashtonpittman) June 2, 2023
Over at TPUSA, Morgonn has written content including a piece titled, "Disney’s Male Employee in a Dress Sparks Outrage," that begins, "At Disney, anyone can be a princess — even a grown man."
Also, "Disney in Decline: Company Loses Billions Due to Woke Agenda."
Noted actor and activist George Takei weighed in, tweeting simply, "They’ve lost their goddamned minds."
Watch Morgonn below or at this link.
A TPUSA Contributor learned Chick-Fil-A has a diversity, equity and inclusion officer:
“Chick-Fil-A you are no longer the Lord’s chicken. You’re actually the woke chicken and I’m really upset about it as a Christian woman.…We’re taking this boycott Chick-Fil-A thing seriously.” pic.twitter.com/oFMCSeR2ie — PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) June 2, 2023
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