Last updated March 6 at 10:00 p.m.
Mayor Daniel Biss announced he briefed Republican staff members of the House Education and Workforce Committee on Friday. He defended his refusal to send Evanston Police Department officers to clear Northwestern’s pro-Palestinian encampment on Deering Meadow in April 2024.
In a Jan. 28 letter, U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) requested Biss, a frontrunner in the Democratic primary for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, brief the committee on “local law enforcement collaboration” between the city and NU during the protest.
“I’m proud of my record of protecting peaceful protest and combating antisemitism, including my decision to decline the unnecessary and undemocratic request to clear the Northwestern encampment in 2024,” Biss wrote in a Friday news release from his campaign.
According to his campaign, the mayor’s briefing lasted less than an hour, and no sitting members of Congress attended.
In a Friday evening statement to The Daily, a spokesperson for the Committee wrote Biss “severely downplayed antisemitism at Northwestern after October 7th” during the briefing by suggesting “the great majority of his Jewish friends in the Northwestern community had no concerns about it.”
Biss accused the Committee of “alarmism” and stated the Anti-Defamation League should not have given NU an F on its 2024 College Antisemitism Report Card, the spokesperson wrote.
“The countless Jewish Northwestern students, faculty, and community members that the Committee has interviewed would say otherwise,” the spokesperson wrote.
In Friday’s news release, the Biss campaign denounced the proceeding as a “politically motivated attack designed to boost his political opponent Laura Fine.”
“From the start, this ‘briefing’ was a flimsy attempt to weaponize the very real threat of antisemitism to attack me and support my opponent,” Biss wrote in the release. “It failed.”
The campaign pointed to reported connections between Fine and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the nation’s largest pro-Israel lobbying group. While AIPAC, Walberg’s top campaign contributor, has not publicly endorsed Fine, it has sent at least two fundraising emails on her behalf.
Following a candidate forum last month, Fine told The Daily she has accepted contributions from individuals who support AIPAC but not from the lobbying group itself.
In a Friday statement to The Daily, a spokesperson for Fine’s campaign wrote the mayor “constantly lays the blame for his own shortcomings at other people’s feet.”
“He sought AIPAC support three times with positions identical to Laura Fine,” the spokesperson wrote, appearing to reference the mayor’s meetings with local AIPAC representatives last year. “His false attacks against Laura show that he’s got no record to run on, and Laura is the only person in this race who can be trusted to lower health care costs and stand up to special interests like the insurance industry.”
In a January Substack post, the mayor suggested that after AIPAC learned he supports a two-state solution and opposes “the humanitarian catastrophe the Netanyahu government has inflicted on Gaza,” the lobbying group decided to support Fine.
The Biss campaign’s Friday release also criticized Fine for quoting NU trustee Michael Sacks’ private text messages with former University President Michael Schill from 2024 on her campaign redbox, a webpage designed to supply messaging to outside groups without direct coordination.
Those messages, among several other exchanges between University officials, were originally publicized by Walberg’s letter. When asked about Sacks’ criticism in an interview with The Daily last month, Fine said she “could see where he was coming from” as a parent.
“There were a lot of people who felt very left behind,” Fine said. “As a parent, if your child does not feel safe on a college campus, it’s very disheartening and very scary.”
Fine added she could not determine whether she would have acted differently during the encampment, citing differences between her experience as a legislator and the responsibilities of Evanston’s mayor.
Marisa Guerra Echeverria contributed reporting.
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