Reporter Claims Rahm Emanuel Tried To Intimidate Him

By Samantha Abernethy in News on Jan 18, 2013 8:00PM

BuzzFeed reporter Michael Hastings says Mayor Rahm Emanuel assaulted and threatened him during an exchange in November 2012. In an interview on The Young Turks (video below), Hastings played audio from the confrontation and said Emanuel grabbed his arm as they spoke and "did not seem like a gentleman who was in full control of what he was doing."

The interviewer asked Hastings if he considered assault charges, and Hastings said, "I did think about that, but I was also in Chicago, which is his city."

"I think it's a very revealing moment of Mayor Rahm Emanuel," Hastings said. "He is obviously a high-profile public official. He's notorious for this kind of abusive and bullying behavior, and he gets away with it again and again and again and rarely is there a record of it."

Hastings writes:

On Nov. 8, 2012, two days after President Obama's re-election, Mayor Rahm Emanuel delivered a speech at the Ritz Carlton in Chicago to raise money for an organization that supports the private funding of part of the city's struggling school system.

After the high-dollar event, I asked the mayor a question about his other fundraising role: the millions of dollars he raised in the final days of the campaign for the Obama superPAC, Priorities USA.

The mayor responded to my question by attempting to berate me, then grabbed me, while his bodyguards approached. A member of the mayor's staff later demanded that I delete the recording of the encounter, and a recording of the mayor's speech to the well-heeled donors.

Watch the interview below. When Emanuel says, “I’m not going to let you do to me what you did to Stanley McChrystal,” that is in reference to a 2010 article Hastings wrote for Rolling Stone. The profile of McChrystal showed the general had serious disagreements with the President's policy, and it ultimately led to his resignation.