A top GOP strategist predicted that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel would become a “massive liability” for Hillary Clinton. | AP Photo Rahm's troubles ripple toward Obama, Clinton Republicans want to make the Chicago mayor's woes a political liability for his former bosses.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s struggles are reverberating in Washington, where he’s causing headaches for his most powerful of close friends and former bosses, the Obamas and the Clintons.

Republicans are eager to make Emanuel — who worked in both the most recent Democratic administrations — a political liability for President Barack Obama and the campaign of Hillary Clinton, both of whom have resisted calling for his resignation over the handling of a video showing a police officer shooting a retreating black teenager. And even among the president’s allies, the famously profane Emanuel is a polarizing figure after playing a key role in the tough-on-crime legislation of the mid-1990s that Obama has made his mission to undo.


A top GOP strategist predicted that Emanuel would become a “massive liability” for Hillary Clinton.

“At some point, she’s going to have to come out — I think the pressure’s going to build on her — on where she stands on her longtime family adviser,” the strategist said.

Emanuel, who has a reputation for his loyalty to friends as fierce as his vindictiveness for enemies, was already doing some damage control on Thursday to better align himself with Clinton. His administration refused for more than a year to release what turned out to be a damning dashboard camera video of an officer shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times, citing the ongoing criminal investigation.

Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon responded to questions about whether Emanuel should stay or go with a statement: "She knows Mayor Emanuel loves Chicago, and is sure he wants to do all he can to restore trust in the Chicago Police Department."

But Fallon also said Clinton was "deeply troubled" by the shooting and outstanding questions related to the video. Through Fallon, Clinton called for a full review of Chicago's policing by the Justice Department.

Emanuel had resisted such a review, calling it "misguided" — until Clinton's views emerged. On Thursday morning, he backtracked, issuing a statement to clarify that he "welcomes" a federal investigation into "systemic issues" in the police department. Later Thursday, an Emanuel spokesman said, "Some may view this issue through a political lens but our focus, and the city’s focus, is on justice, improving our system of police accountability and working to restore trust in our police department."

But Emanuel’s predicament is perhaps more awkward for Obama. Though their temperaments couldn’t be more different, few are as close to the calm and collected president than the hotheaded Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff. He’s a member of the exclusive club of people who have the president’s private email address, and the White House visitor logs show frequent drop-ins to the Oval Office in addition to meetings with current chief of staff Denis McDonough and other top aides. When Obama headed home to Chicago for a speech to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in October, the president and the mayor caught up backstage.

That was all before Tuesday, when Emanuel fired Chicago’s chief of police and batted back calls for his own resignation and before Friday, when demonstrators shut down the Magnificent Mile to protest delays in charging officer Jason Van Dyke with murdering McDonald more than a year earlier.

Emanuel has cited his recent reelection as reason to stay in office, and so far White House spokesman Josh Earnest has echoed that rationale — resulting in a less-than-full-throated endorsement of Emanuel’s tenure.

President Barack Obama hasn't made mention of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (left) in his response to the McDonald shooting, but one Republican strategist said that can't last long. | AP photo

“Obviously, the citizens of the city of Chicago will have to determine who should be running the city, including evaluating his commitment over the long term to implementing reforms,” Earnest said on Wednesday.

Earnest has had to field a series of questions about why Obama had been quiet about this police shooting (relative to last year's unrest in Ferguson), whether he was protecting a buddy — and whether Obama’s Chicago-based library would be “more difficult to get going” sans a Mayor Emanuel. (Earnest’s response: “Not at all.”)

In fact, Obama did weigh in on the McDonald shooting and its aftermath in a Facebook post that received relatively little notice over the Thanksgiving holiday. Obama said last week that he was “deeply disturbed” by the footage, praised the “overwhelming majority” of cops who “protect our communities with honor” and added that he was “personally grateful to the people of my hometown for keeping protests peaceful.”

Obama made no mention of Emanuel, but that can’t last long, the Republican strategist predicted.

“It’s one thing to call out some unknown faceless person,” the strategist said. “When the person that’s at the forefront of the controversy is a person that’s been intertwined with your political career, it’s more difficult to evade that.”

Few of the people who worked with Emanuel are left in the West Wing. The president is the most important exception, of course, but White House aides say the two Chicagoans haven’t spoken in recent days. Still, Emanuel was known for sticking by Obama’s decisions once they were made, no matter how much he might have fought against them, and there’s little sign that Obama’s loyalty to his former aide will be shaken, either.

Nonetheless, that Emanuel finds himself in a predicament around policing practices comes as no surprise to some of Obama’s key allies on the matter.

A top GOP strategist predicted that Rahm Emanuel would become a “massive liability” for Hillary Clinton. | AP photo

As an adviser to President Bill Clinton, Emanuel played a central role in the passage of the 1994 crime bill (along with then-Sen. Joe Biden), which critics now blame for a system of mass incarceration that disproportionately affects minorities. Obama has made criminal justice reform a top priority of his last year in office, and on Thursday morning, he invited members of Congress to the White House to discuss bipartisan sentencing reform measures on the Hill.

“He was very dismissive of the civil rights community and their concerns about the disparities in the criminal justice system, the policing tactics that had caused riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict just a few years before,” said Laura W. Murphy, a former director of the ACLU’s legislative office. “He was very clear that the Democrats needed that crime bill to appear tough on crime.”

Murphy, who advised Obama on crime policy during his transition, and while she doesn’t blame the president for prioritizing the economy over those issues early in his term, Emanuel didn’t help.

“Rahm was antagonistic toward then-Attorney General Eric Holder and antagonistic toward the very people the president needed to create reform,” Murphy said.

Other advocates note that Emanuel had appeared to be moving away from his hard-liner stance on crime as mayor. At the same time, the police superintendent he fired, Garry McCarthy, is a co-chairman of a high-profile coalition of police and prosecutors who back criminal justice reform, Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime & Incarceration.

So for the White House, the more difficult lesson may be how hard it is to enact policing changes, even when its most determined allies are in charge of implementing them.

“The federal government can’t impose these best practices on local law enforcement organizations across the country,” Earnest said.

Annie Karni contributed to this report.