Chicago Tribune's Kristen McQueary Talks NRI With "Riley & Scot"

Riley & I had the opportunity this morning to talk with Chicago Tribune editorial board member (and author of a tremendous recent editorial on the Independent Map proposal being tossed off the ballot) Kristen McQueary about the most recent developments in the investigation and hearings into Governor Quinn's troubled anti-violence program.

Kristen is a Rockford native, a Guilford grad, a big White Sox fan, and obviously a keen observer of the passing political scene. So she's OK with me. She also has a tremendous singing voice. More on that in a bit.

Kristen previously was a longtime Illinois Statehouse reporter. So as both the feds and the state begin to dig through the details of the Neighborhood Recovery Initiative, we asked her how the unfolding of this investigation feels compared to the Ryan and Blagojevich inquiries:

It feels like those did in the sense that it's just trickling out and that there's a lot we don't know. The biggest issue here, and why there's a thread between all these investigations is that you cannot leverage state assets to further your campaign. You cannot mix those two. So that's what Blagojevich did...and that's what Ryan was accused of doing...so it does have a lot of those same threads. But we could end up with the feds looking into this, interviewing a lot of people, and not coming up with anything.

Here's our full conversation with Kristen in which, yes, she does sing the Guilford fight song at around the 8:50 mark: