Third candidate for county inspector general is longtime county employee

After going outside Cook County government for candidates for the county inspector general's office, two bar associations have picked a county employee as the third candidate.

Cook County Assistant State's Attorney Patrick Blanchard was selected by the Chicago Bar Association and the Cook County Bar Association to join the current candidates, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Ferguson and Los Angeles Unified School District Deputy Inspector General Robert Williams, as a finalist for the job.

Williams, Ferguson and Terry Hake, a former inspector general for the U.S. Justice Department, were initially selected to be the three finalists, but Hake dropped out shortly before the announcement of finalists was made. Blanchard now replaces him as a candidate.

Whereas Ferguson and Williams appeared to have no prior connections to county government, Blanchard is a veteran of county government, serving as a division chief in the civil actions bureau and working in the office for more than a decade. He has been a regular donor to his boss, Cook County State's Attorney Richard Devine.

Terry Murphy, executive director of the Chicago Bar Association, said the selection committee weighed that aspect of his candidacy carefully in considering Blanchard, but "felt that he has such good integrity that he would not be influenced (in the inspector general's job) by his work in the state's attorney's office."

Blanchard has no law enforcement experience, but has handled medical malpractice cases against the county, as well as labor and employment law cases. Some of the bigger cases he handled included defending the county against accusations of rigged political hiring in the Shakman case, charges of civil rights violations against Cook County jail prisoners, and allegations of abuse of juveniles held at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center.

Before that, he served in private practice at Clausen Miller, said Patrick Driscoll, head of the civil actions bureau of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office.

"He worked his way up from a line assistant to a division chief," said Driscoll. "The county would gain if he were in that job and he would be missed here a lot."

An independent inspector general's office was a major promise of Cook County Board President Todd Stroger's campaign in 2006, and he has put forward ordinances increasing the number of staffers in the office and setting up the mechanism for the selection process. He will now pick one of the three candidates, which the board must then approve or reject.