Former Lake County Coroner Thomas Rudd has been indicted on five felony counts of perjury, with authorities alleging he falsely claimed to have witnessed signatures on his election nominating petitions.
The grand jury indictment follows a yearlong investigation by Lake County Sheriff’s detectives and the Office of Professional Standards, authorities said in a news release Wednesday. A Lake County judge has issued a $150,000 arrest warrant for Rudd, the release said.
"I have nothing to say until I talk to my lawyer," Rudd said when reached by the Lake County News-Sun Wednesday.
The indictment accuses Rudd of falsely attesting that he personally gathered voter signatures on five pages of his nominating petitions for his failed 2016 re-election bid. The law requires that the person who circulates a nominating petition sign each page to attest that the signatures were witnessed and are valid. Because the pages Rudd signed were formally notarized, he was considered to be under oath at the time, according to the indictment.
Rudd, 70, a Democrat in a county whose elected officials have historically trended Republican, served for one term as coroner starting in 2012. He sought to run for re-election last year, but voluntarily withdrew his nominating petitions for the primary election after the documents were challenged. In addition to the issue cited in the new indictment, those who challenged Rudd’s petitions also challenged the validity of some signatures.
Rudd said at the time that he might have made a clerical error in his petitions but called the effort to oust him from the ballot "a political witch hunt."
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The Bannockburn resident set to be Lake County’s next coroner said one of the first things on his to-do list is sitting down with the funeral directors and police chiefs in the area to “mend some bridges that have been a little broken.”
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"I did make a mistake, and the question is what was the intent," Rudd told the News-Sun last year. "Was it to hide something? No. What it was was a clerical error because I did not know the election code law. Nobody’s perfect. If you’re saying that an individual who holds this office must not have ever made an error in their life, there’d be nobody who could hold this office."
After withdrawing his petitions, Rudd then sought to run as an independent candidate, but the courts ruled that he could not because he had already filed to run as a Democrat. After the state Supreme Court declined to hear his case, he ended up mounting an unsuccessful bid as a write-in candidate.
Republican Howard Cooper ultimately won the election to replace Rudd.
Ross Secler, an attorney who represented Rudd in his bid to get on the November ballot, declined to comment on the particulars of Rudd’s criminal case.
But Secler called the indictment against Rudd "pretty ridiculous. It seems really vindictive."
Illinois Supreme Court will not hear candidacy appeal by Lake County coroner Emily K. Coleman
The Illinois Supreme Court will not hear Lake County Coroner Thomas Rudd’s appeal of a decision to block him from the November ballot as an independent, ending Rudd’s efforts to run for re-election as something other than a write-in candidate.
The state’s highest court didn’t provide a reason for…
The Illinois Supreme Court will not hear Lake County Coroner Thomas Rudd’s appeal of a decision to block him from the November ballot as an independent, ending Rudd’s efforts to run for re-election as something other than a write-in candidate.
The state’s highest court didn’t provide a reason for…
(Emily K. Coleman)
During his term in office, Rudd often had a difficult relationship with law-enforcement officials, particularly in regards to high-profile cases like that of Melissa Calusinski, the day care worker convicted of murder of a boy in a her care, and the shooting death of Fox Lake police Lt. Joe Gliniewicz.
Rudd was the first public official to acknowledge openly that Gliniewicz might have shot himself — a theory authorities eventually came to conclude was correct after outwardly casting his death as a homicide by suspects he was chasing.
Rudd appeared to have ruffled feathers of investigators, but others lauded the coroner, saying he helped prevent a potential coverup of the circumstances of Gliniewicz’s death.
In the Calusinski case, Rudd reinvested the boy’s death and reclassified it from homicide to undetermined. When Rudd testified last year in a hearing relating to Calusinski’s bid for a new trial, he was grilled by prosecutors, who suggested he had was improperly advocating for Calusinski’s conviction to be overturned.
When asked if Rudd’s history of disagreements raises suspicion of any politically-motivated agenda’s in this case, Secler said: "Given what he did in the office and how they came after him, I would let you decide that conclusion."
Lake County State’s Attorney Michael Nerheim said the investigation began after someone submitted a complaint to his office regarding Rudd’s conduct.
"It’s the job of the state’s attorney to represent the coroner, so, to avoid any issue, we immediately asked a special prosecutors to look into it," Nerheim said.
Tony Briscoe is a Tribune reporter; Emily Coleman and Jim Newton are Lake County News-Sun reporters.
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