A Democrat Chicago treasurer who has her sights set on Congress has been accused of forcing taxpayer-funded staff to plan her daughter’s birthday and act as her personal bodyguard. 

The city’s treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin, who was elected in May 2019, was accused of running a corrupt office and illegally firing two employees who raised concerns about her alleged misdeeds.   

In an letter from December 2020 that was only just unsealed and published by the Chicago Tribune, the public official is accused of having a ‘disturbing conduct’ and using ‘pervasive practices’ for her own benefit. 

Conyears-Ervin allegedly threatened staff, telling them they: ‘Should not care if her plans are illegal since the only way they could lose their jobs is if she fires them.’ 

The ordeal that triggered the accusations was the firing of two of her top aides under the alleged guise of an ‘office shake-up’ in November 2020.

Tiffany Harper and Ashley Evans alleged their firings ‘violated the Illinois whistleblower act, federal laws, and a city ordinance.’ 

Before they were fired, the letter claimed Conyears-Ervin told the women if they refused to implement her plans their ‘asses can walk’ and that they ‘will be walking the f*** up out of here.’

Conyears-Ervin believed ‘this is (her) f***ing office and (her) vision,’ the blistering letter from 2020 alleged. 

They sent the letter to the city’s Board of Ethics demanding reinstatement. They were eventually given a $100,000 settlement to share in 2021. 

The scathing letter, written by their attorney Michael Kanovitz, claimed Conyears-Ervin only sacked his clients out of retaliation.

It read: ‘The retaliation is clear, as is the corruption in the Treasurer’s office. The inference of retaliation is inescapable.’ 

One of the misconducts Conyears-Ervin is accused of is the hiring of Gina Zuccaro. 

Zuccaro, who is her political ally, was hired to be an administrative assistant. 

She organized her daughter’s birthday party and did her grocery shopping on the taxpayer’s dime, the letter claims. 

The letter states: ‘The Treasurer uses her for personal services like running errands, planning her daughter’s birthday party, grocery shopping and the like. 

‘The Treasurer also used City resources to support Ms. Zuccaro’s run for the and Illinois House of Representatives seat by allowing her to campaign on City time. 

‘This misuse of hiring to obtain personal services and favor her allies is a pervasive problem, extending well past these two employees to numerous other employees and contractors.’

The letter continued: ‘Treasurer Conyears-Ervin engaged in a pattern of disturbing conduct against the public trust, many of which violated the City of Chicago ethics rules as well as state and federal law. 

‘Her consistent and pervasive practice has been to misuse City money, City employees and City resources to benefit her private interests as well as those of her friends and campaign supporters.’

Conyears-Ervin also decided to hire an ex-Chicago police officer as her private security guard and driver – which was also a point of contention for the former staffers. 

The letter continued: ‘After losing a public battle with the Mayor on this issue, the Treasurer hired an ex-CPD officer to fill the opening of Assistant to City Treasurer, a job that requires financial training and experience which the candidate was utterly lacking.

‘This employee does not provide any services to the office and does not even come into the office. 

‘Rather he serves as a private armed security guard to the Treasurer and is her driver.’

As well as this, the treasurer was accused of using city money and resources to ‘advance the agenda of several churches and other religious organizations, many of which support her and her husband.’ 

Conyears-Ervin declined to address any of the specific allegations in the letter, but said last week in a statement given to the Tribune: ‘While I am not allowed to discuss the specifics of this settlement, I will make a general statement as I take these matters seriously.

‘I have never, nor will I ever abuse or misuse taxpayer dollars and breach the public trust. I treat my responsibility to the citizens and taxpayers with the utmost respect.’

The Housemates  

By Teun Toebes (September Publishing £12.99, 256pp)

Here’s an ineradicably strange book that adds something interesting and possibly even important to dementia literature, the huge and burgeoning new genre that is never read by anyone suffering from the disease, only by their poor benighted friends and relatives.

Teun Toebes is a young Dutch nursing student in his early 20s who, finding himself short of money and without anywhere to live, took the opportunity to move into a nursing home and experience the daily life of its elderly residents.

He wouldn’t be a nurse or a carer, he made absolutely clear to the people running the home — he would be a housemate, approaching his fellow inmates as an equal, albeit a 21-year-old equal who could leave the establishment any time he chose, which they obviously could not.

He’s an odd one, Teun: long-haired, not very masculine, but very empathetic, and obviously as well suited to a nursing career as anyone can hope to be.

And while his course rattles along in the background, we soon realise that he is learning as much about his future vocation through his unusual living arrangements as though his lectures and essays. His book tells us what we, those of us who are not of this age yet, need to know.

One of his first, most pertinent points is that care homes are not sufficiently ‘homes’ for anyone: they are bland, institutional and sterile. They are prisons for the afflicted, who, let’s remember, have committed no crime and do not need to be punished. 

Why, he asks, are so many of these ‘homes’ run for staff and shareholders rather than the inmates? ‘I don’t want everything in my life to be managed by other people,’ one oldster tells him.

In the context of the care home, this sounds like dangerous rabble-rousing, rather than just a completely valid request for a little respect.

Teun makes friends. He learns that just because people have dementia, doesn’t mean they lose their capacity for feeling things just as strongly as they did before, or that they’re gaga all the time, or that they haven’t noticed that they have been shipped in from their comfortable homes to this high-security prison, always positioned on a roundabout or in a bleak business park.

(Why are care homes often positioned in the most grim, inhospitable places? Because those places are cheaper, of course. The bottom line is everything.)

Teun starts to get angry. Why can’t he change the awful institutional curtains in his room? 

Because only one supplier of curtains is permitted. Their designs are awful, and they charge an arm and a leg because they have the monopoly and that’s all they care about. 

Why can’t more items from the oldsters’ former homes be brought into the care home? Because of health and safety, usually. Health and safety — which scarcely matters in the outside world — trumps all other considerations in the care home.

Why is the TV on all the time? Because no one cares if anyone is watching it or not, and it’s deemed to keep the oldsters quiet, if not happy. Teun rapidly comes to the conclusion that we have to completely rethink these places and their priorities, as soon as humanly possible.

I know of three or four oldies currently banged up in HM Prison Carehome, and the one thing they all have in common, other than being very unhappy, is that they keep asking their relatives when they can return to their real homes. Is this what anyone wants for their end of life? Is it what we want for the end of ours?

Teun finds an ally in Niels, one of the nicest (and thus most popular) members of staff. ‘We both agree on the need for change, because we wouldn’t want to grow old in a nursing home like this.

So what exactly needs to happen?… We almost always conclude that we want to be treated normally, in an environment that’s as normal as possible. We want to be able to go out, have a cosy, cluttered room and eat leftovers whenever we fancy. No gates, locked doors, sterile floors or temperature-controlled food.’

Teun’s book is written throughout with a puppyish lightness of touch: it’s a young man’s book, for sure, so when he gets polemical, you genuinely sit up and take notice.

What effect it will have, if any, is hard to gauge, but it has been widely translated and become a bestseller across Europe. There’s nothing here that we didn’t know in our hearts, but sometimes it is good to be told. We can now consider that we have been told.

Americans by wide margins say President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, violated a law against peddling foreign influence, a DailyMail.com poll shows, amid swirling allegations about the first family’s business dealings.

Fully 63 percent of voters say the president breached the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which obliges people to declare foreign interests, when he served as vice president and his son worked with the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.

Another 29 percent said they did not believe Biden, a Democrat, had broken the rules, and 8 percent were not sure. Republican voters overwhelmingly said Biden had committed wrongdoing, as did 38 percent of Democrats.

The results follow the claims from Hunter’s former friend business partner, Devon Archer, about how the first son raked in huge sums by selling his ties to father Joe, in a bombshell congressional testimony and interviews earlier this month.

Biden, who was then vice president in the Obama administration, was present in-person during dinner meetings and sat in on at least 20 phone calls with foreign associates, Archer told the House Oversight Committee.

After the testimony, committee chairman James Comer, a Republican, said Archer’s revelations marked a ‘huge step toward implicating Joe Biden’ in violating FARA by assisting Hunter’s dealings with Burisma, where he served on the board.

Biden this week insisted he ‘never talked business’ with Hunter or his associates.

Our DailyMail.com/TIPP poll survey of 542 US adults earlier this month focussed only on people who followed Archer’s testimony.

Those respondents were even more persuaded of wrongdoing by the president’s son.

Fully 69 percent said Hunter had broken FARA rules by representing a Chinese energy company without registering as a foreign agent.

Another 18 percent said the younger Biden had not violated FARA, and 13 percent were not sure. 

Republicans overwhelmingly found fault with Hunter, as did nearly half of Democrats.

Comer on Thursday raised the stakes on the Bidens again, saying his committee will subpoena members of the family to testify about their business dealings.

‘This was always gonna end with the Bidens coming in front of the committee. We are going to subpoena the family,’ Comer told Fox Business.

‘We know that this is going to end up in court when we subpoena the Bidens.’

Speaker Kevin McCarthy has floated the idea of launching an impeachment inquiry to give greater weight to congressional subpoena power of the Biden investigations.

In his testimony and interviews, Archer did not claim to have ever heard Joe Biden discussing business but said Hunter would use his father as a flex.

Hearing the voice of the vice president on speed dial was enough to sell the ‘brand’ to foreign executives, he said.

‘I can definitively say at particular dinners or meetings, he knew there were business associates,’ Archer told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson last week in an interview following his testimony.

‘I don’t know if it was an orchestrated call-in or not. It certainly was powerful, though, because, you know, if you’re sitting with a foreign businessperson, and you hear the vice president’s voice, that’s prize enough,’ Archer went on.

‘Sometimes it was the call was coming in and the speaker would go on,’ Archer said, detailing the conversations.

‘You understand DC, right? So the power to have that access in that conversation – it’s not in a scheduled conference call and that’s a part of your family. That’s like the pinnacle of power in DC.’

Comer claims to have found records detailing over $20 million in payments to the Biden family and their partners from foreign business leaders around the time Joe was vice president.

Weeks ago Hunter Biden’s plea deal for tax and gun crimes blew up when a judge informed him he would not be shielded from future charges, specifically mentioning a violation of FARA, or failing to register as a foreign agent.

FARA was enacted in 1938 to counter Nazi propaganda. 

It requires foreign lobbyists to register with the Justice Department. Prosecutors brought a handful of FARA cases in the postwar era, but stepped up cases in 2019 to counter rising Russian interference.

Rioting broke out in a Paris suburb tonight after a policeman was accused of executing a teenage driver in cold blood after telling him: ‘I’m going to lodge a bullet in your head’.

The alleged killing was videoed in Nanterre, to the west of the French capital, earlier today after the youth – who is from an Algerian background – was said to have broken traffic rules.

The victim was soon identified as Nael, 17, while the officer was arrested and placed in custody.

As youths began to pour on the streets, setting fire to dustbins and buildings, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin appealed for calm.

He told the National Assembly in Paris that the images posted on social media were ‘extremely shocking and worrying,’ and urged people to ‘respect the grief of the family and the presumption of innocence of the police’.

Angry scenes played out in Paris this evening as youths confronted police, with videos shared on social media showing pushing and shoving between young men and officers wearing riot gear.

One clip appeared to show a young woman shouting ‘I hate France’ as an officer mutters ‘return to Africa’.

Seven people have so far been arrested after protesting this evening, authorities said.

Two other people were in the vehicle with Nael at the time of the shooting. A first passenger fled, while the second, also a minor, was arrested and taken into custody.

Nanterre mayor Patrick Jarry said he was ‘shocked’ by the video images and passed his ‘sincere condolences to the boy’s mother’.

‘He hopes that the investigations opened (…) will make it possible to shed light as quickly as possible on the exact circumstances of this tragedy,’ his office said.

The 17-year-old was in the Paris suburb of Nanterre earlier today when police shot him dead after he broke road rules and failed to stop, prosecutors said.

Emergency services tried to resuscitate him at the scene but he died shortly afterwards.

The officer accused of firing on the driver has been detained on homicide charges, the Nanterre prosecutors’ office said.

An authenticated  video circulating on social media shows two police officers trying to stop the vehicle and one pointing his weapon at the driver through the window 

He shouts ‘I’m going to lodge a bullet in your head’ before firing at point blank range when as the driver steers away.

The car moved for 10 yards, before crashing to a halt, with shocked passers-by looking on.

The IGPN national police inspectorate has opened an investigation into possible intentional killing by a person holding a position of public authority.

A separate probe is being carried out by regional police into the driver’s failure to halt and alleged attempt to kill a person holding a position of public authority

Paris police chief Laurent Nunez said the action of the officer ‘raises questions’, while claiming that the officer may have ‘felt threatened.’

The family’s lawyer Yassine Bouzrou told the same channel that while all parties needed to wait for the result of the investigation the images ‘clearly showed a policeman killing a young man in cold blood.’

‘This is a long way from any kind of legitimate defence’ he said, adding the family had filed a complaint, accusing police of ‘lying’ by initially claiming the car had tried to run down the officers.

‘It’s so sad, he was so young,’ said Samia Bough, 62, the teenager’s former neighbour, who came to lay a bouquet of yellow roses at the scene.

In 2022, a record 13 deaths were recorded after refusals to stop for traffic controls. Five police officers have been charged in these cases.

Authorities and police unions blame the 2022 figures on more dangerous driving behaviour, but researchers also point to a 2017 law modifying the conditions of the use of their weapon by the police.

Two weeks ago, a 19-year-old was killed by a police officer he had injured in the legs with his car in the western town of Angouleme.

The left reacted with anger, saying police had no right to kill people simply because they refused to stop.

‘Yes, a refusal to stop is against the law. But death is not one of the sanctions provided for by the penal code,’ tweeted the coordinator of the hard left France Unbowed (LFI) party, Manuel Bompard.

‘A refusal to stop does not provide a licence to kill,’ said Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure.