A political spending committee run by a close political ally of Illinois State Sen. President Don Harmon, and which spent millions of dollars to ensure Democratic control of the Illinois Supreme Court, has been hit with one of the largest fines in state history for violating campaign finance rules.
Further, campaign finance records show that, after the state elections board issued a notice of assessment and warning of the potential penalties, the committee transferred all of the remaining funds to a different political spending committee, also purportedly led by the same Harmon ally.
On Nov. 21, the Illinois State Board of Elections signed off on an order directing the All for Justice campaign committee to pay $99,500 in penalties for refusing to file campaign spending reports, as required by state law and Illinois elections rules.
Luke A. Casson
| andreou-casson.com
The news was first reported by the Chicago Tribune.
The All for Justice independent expenditure committee was created in August 2022 by personal injury lawyer Luke Casson.
Casson is one of the principles at the firm of Andreou & Casson, located on West Lake Street in Chicago's Loop.
Casson, however, resides in suburban Oak Park, where he has been active in the local Democratic Party for years. He also serves as an elected member of the board of trustees at Triton College.
Casson has been politically linked to his fellow powerful Oak Park Democrat, Senate President Harmon. Perhaps as a symbol of his position, Casson was selected to represent Harmon as part of the legal team that led the defense of the controversial SAFE-T Act, the state criminal justice reform law that made Illinois the first state in the country to prohibit judges from using cash bail to keep criminal defendants in jail pending trial.
That defense included proceedings before the Illinois Supreme Court, including two new Democratic justices that Casson's All for Justice committee helped elect.
The ad campaign targeted Republican state Supreme Court nominees former Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran and former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Burke, particularly asserting that the Republicans would somehow overturn abortion rights in Illinois, which is led by Gov. JB Pritzker, regarded as one of the most enthusiastically pro-abortion governors in the country, and a pro-abortion Democratic supermajority in General Assembly.
The ads smeared the Republican candidates as ideologues who would rule in line with the wishes of conservative politicians. Those accusations came despite Rochford's and O'Brien's own campaign pledges in support of abortion rights and touted endorsements from left-wing political groups.
Rochford and O'Brien also received millions of dollars in donations from Pritzker, Harmon and Illinois House Speaker Emanuel "Chris" Welch, the most powerful Democratic lawmaker in the state House.
Rochford and O'Brien have been publicly accused of violating Illinoisans' rights to due process by refusing to step aside from ruling on the constitutionality of controversial new laws supported by Pritzker, Harmon and Welch.
Recently, challengers to the state's ban on so-called "assault weapons" has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and review the Illinois state high court's ruling, authored by Rochford, upholding the gun ban law. The challengers say Rochford and O'Brien refusal to recuse themselves in that case amounts to defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2009 ruling in the case known as Caperton v. Massey. In that case, the SCOTUS ruled that a West Virginia Supreme Court justice violated litigants' constitutional rights by refusing to recuse himself in a case in which he received substantial campaign support from one of the parties.
The All for Justice campaign was heavily bankrolled by the state's trial lawyers, as well as other big Democratic donors, such as labor unions, teachers unions, out-of-state left-wing political action committees, and hundreds of thousands of dollars from a campaign connected to Harmon himself.
Notably, the committee also received $500,000 from a source identified in campaign finance records as "Fair Fight."
That name is the same as belonging to a prominent national left-wing fund associated with failed Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams. However, campaign records indicates the "Fair Fight" fund that donated to the All for Justice committee listed an address in suburban LaGrange, which is also associated with influential labor group the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150, which operates a campaign donation fund known as "Fight Back."
If the donations originated through Abrams' "Fair Fight" group, it would have been accepted despite Democrats’ protests that Republicans were intending to use big money donations from outside the state to fund state Supreme Court candidates in 2022. Democratic lawmakers cited those concerns in passing a law barring people from outside Illinois from donating directly to judicial campaigns and candidates in Illinois.
The law, however, exempted independent expenditure committees, like All for Justice, from the ban.
A federal judge has since issued a permanent injunction against enforcement of that law, saying it amounted to an unconstitutional effort to block conservative donors from donating to Republican candidates for Illinois Supreme Court and other state courts, specifically in 2020.
Pritzker and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul did not oppose the injunction, but merely surrendered in early 2023, after Democrats had used the unconstitutional law to wield a massive funding advantage in the Supreme Court races, thanks to the big donations from Pritzker and his Democratic allies.
The Supreme Court races in 2022 were also literally shaped by Democratic lawmakers, who moved in 2021 to take the unprecedented step of gerrymandering Illinois State Supreme Court judicial district boundaries, in what critics said was a nakedly partisan move to prevent Republicans from potentially securing a majority on the court, using the old district lines that had remained unchanged since 1963.
Ultimately, Rochford's and O'Brien's victory allowed Democrats to increase their majority on the Illinois Supreme Court from 4-3 to 5-2. That supermajority has since issued rulings upholding several highly controversial state laws and policies enacted by Pritzker and his allies in the General Assembly.
According to the state Board of Elections, however, the All For Justice campaign committee ignored state law by failing to file reports detailing its campaign spending from its inception in August 2022 to the end of the year.
In August 2023, the ISBE sent Casson a letter notifying him that the board had determined All For Justice had violated Illinois campaign finance laws and was being assessed $99,500 in penalties.
That figure alone would rank among the highest ever levied in Illinois history for such a violation, an ISBE spokesperson said.
However, the spokesperson said, Casson and All For Justice declined the option to appeal within a 30 day period prescribed by the law.
The spokesperson said nearly all such penalties are appealed, and typically reduced on appeal.
Campaign finance records show that about a month after ISBE notified Casson of the penalties, All For Justice then transferred $149,515 - all that remained in its accounts - to the Chicago Independent Alliance campaign committee.
According to online campaign disclosure records, the president and treasurer of the Chicago Independent Alliance is identified as Mary Chunn Daves, of Hinsdale.
However, the business address for the Chicago Independent Alliance committee is 661 W. Lake St., Suite 2N, Chicago - the same address as Casson's law office and the same address used by All for Justice.
The Chicago Independent Alliance committee states as its purpose: "To make independent expenditures in support of independent candidates and common sense economic policies for growth and prosperity."
While All For Justice's accounts have been allegedly cleared, under state law, a committee's officers may still be held individually liable for penalties assessed against the committee by the ISBE.
Editor's note: This article has been revised to reflect uncertainty over the origin of more than $500,000 in donations received by the All For Justice campaign fund from a contributor listed as "Fair Fight."