Cook County Board of Review fires aide with criminal background

A Democratic Cook County elected official fired an aide who had pleaded guilty in federal court and testified in a corruption case against his brother before he was hired, according to records obtained by WBEZ.

Board of Review Commissioner Samantha Steele initially defended giving Jon Snyder a job on her staff at the obscure but influential agency, where Steele is one of three commissioners with power to decide property tax appeals across the county.

But Steele suspended Snyder in June and initiated an internal investigation after a reporter asked her about his past. And in confidential documents obtained by WBEZ, Board of Review investigators alleged that Snyder “has had multiple violations” of a policy regulating side jobs for agency employees.

“He has been repeatedly warned of the requirements and consequences and he chose to disregard these warnings,” Cristin Duffy, the Board of Review’s general counsel and chief ethics officer at the time, wrote to Steele in August.

The alleged violations centered on Snyder’s company that conducts appraisals in Indiana, Florida and Illinois, the investigative records show.

Board of Review documents indicate Steele at first questioned whether Snyder should face anything more than a verbal warning, but she fired him in early October.

In an email to the agency’s attorney a week after he was fired, Snyder defended his actions. He wrote that he took the job with Steele when she was elected in 2022 after she promised he “could reside in Indiana and work from Florida when needed” and that he could run his appraisal company “as long as I was getting my county files done.”

Snyder added, “I was never officially admonished for poor work ethic or abusing [Board of Review] policies until after Samantha demanded that I resign. … I was only praised for my work to the point that I was given a substantial raise at the beginning of 2024.”

The internal investigation also concluded Snyder was not required to disclose his federal rap sheet in Indiana when he applied for the job in Cook County and that Steele “was aware of the criminal conviction, and it did not impact her decision to hire Snyder.”

Steele did not return multiple messages seeking comment, but records obtained by WBEZ show Snyder is fighting his termination, with his union’s support.

On Oct. 31, a lawyer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31 filed a charge against the Board of Review on Snyder’s behalf. Besides asking for Snyder to get his county job back, the union argued that the Illinois Labor Relations Board should “make him whole for all loss of pay and benefits due to his termination.”

Steele lives in Evanston and represents the Board of Review district covering the North Side, the North Shore and northwest suburbs. She was arrested last month in Chicago and charged with driving under the influence after crashing a vehicle into parked cars along Ashland Avenue.

Before beginning his work for Steele, Snyder was the assessor in Porter County, in northwest Indiana. His cooperation with the feds included secretly recording conversations with his brother James Snyder, who was accused of corruption as the mayor of Portage, Indiana.

After Jon Snyder helped in winning James Snyder’s conviction, Jon Snyder was sentenced to one year of probation for a single misdemeanor tax-related charge.

James Snyder fought his own conviction all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which recently sided with him in a ruling widely seen as making it more difficult to prosecute public officials under anti-corruption laws. But prosecutors are seeking to try James Snyder again.

When Jon Snyder was questioned earlier this year during the Board of Review investigation into him, he told county officials that the FBI had offered him immunity when he cooperated with them, board records show.

But Duffy, who was the Board of Review’s top counsel, wrote that Snyder “failed to disclose what he would be ‘immune’ from,” according to the report issued after the “confidential” investigation last summer.

The records obtained by WBEZ show Duffy leveled a series of accusations against Snyder in a letter to the board’s secretary on July 22. She recommended he get a written warning.

On Aug. 19, Steele “declined to follow” the guidance from the Board of Review’s general counsel, according to documents obtained by WBEZ. And Snyder continued to be employed for nearly two more months at the Board of Review, where he was paid more than $91,000 a year for working on commercial tax appeals cases.

But in early October, a top aide to Steele wrote that the commissioner had decided to eliminate Snyder’s position to create another vacancy.

“Mr. Snyder was chosen as he was the only employee who had a disciplinary infraction,” Steele aide Dan Balanoff wrote in an email to another Board of Review official on Oct. 2.

Dan Mihalopoulos is an investigative reporter on WBEZ’s Government & Politics Team.