Feder: Before he became 'Mayor Pete,' Buttigieg worked as NBC 5 investigative intern

For six weeks during the summer of 2002, a 20-year-old college student named Peter Buttigieg toiled in the background as an intern at WMAQ-Channel 5, the NBC-owned station in Chicago, Robert Feder writes.

Few could have imagined then that he would become mayor of his hometown of South Bend, Indiana, or that 18 years later he would be on the March 17 Illinois Democratic primary ballot as a candidate for president of the United States.

The record of his employment at NBC 5 - which ran from June 17 to July 28, 2002 - shows that Buttigieg received an "outstanding" rating on his evaluation form as an intern with the station's investigative unit. Otherwise the files provide no other details about his time there.

But Renee Ferguson, the Unit 5 investigative reporter who supervised Buttigieg that summer, recalled that the Harvard sophomore worked with her on an investigation of a sex offender who was believed to be working at a day care center in Chicago.

Get the full report, and more Chicago media news, at robertfeder.com.