Rahm Emanuel Details Federal Want List With Jeff Sessions: Report

By Stephen Gossett in News on Feb 14, 2017 11:00PM

Mayor Rahm Emanuel was in Washington D.C. on Monday to meet with several of the Trump administrations top officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions. During the meeting, Rahm reportedly made a rather big push for federal resources.

Unnamed mayoral sources told the Sun-Times that Emanuel floated police-training funds, money for law-enforcement technology, and mentoring and jobs programs for young Chicagoans. He also reiterated the need for more stringent federal prosecution of gun offenders.

The Mayor’s office shined a little bit of light on the Emanuel-in-D.C. proceedings as well. "Public safety is a top priority for everyone, and over the course of the day the mayor reiterated his request for added federal resources including ex-offender programs, mentoring and increased federal gun prosecution in Chicago, as well as additional federal agents," mayoral spokesman Matt McGrath told the Tribune in a statement.

Along with Sessions, Emanuel also met with President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, among other high-ranking officials.

The meeting came at a critical time between Sessions and Emanuel. The city of Chicago is negotiating a consent decree on how to implement recommendations from a scathing, 13-month-long investigation into the Chicago Police Department by the Department of Justice—the agency Sessions now heads. Sessions in the past has been skeptical of consent decrees and cited low police morale as a contributor toward violent crime in cities like Chicago.

Also coloring the backdrop, of course, is Trump’s habitual flogging of Chicago and its violent crime. He recently said the undocumented immigrants were fueling Chicago gangs and said that the city is worse than war-torn “places in the Middle East” after infamously threatening to “send in the feds.”

Now that Emanuel is indeed jockeying for how best to take advantage of federal assistance, it looks like he has his eye on quite a bit—at least in the first rounds of negotiation.