Risley Named Acting Legislative Inspector General
Retired Assistant U.S. Attorney David Risley will assume the role of Legislative Inspector General on October 1.
A longtime federal prosecutor and former investigator in the Legislative Inspector General’s office will become the Acting LIG on October 1.
The Legislative Ethics Commission announced Monday David Risley of Springfield would step into the LIG role when Michael McCuskey’s resignation takes effect at the end of the month.
Risley, 74, of Springfield was an investigator in the LIG’s office from 2019-2022 and has continued to serve as a part time ethics advisor.
He was previously Director of Public Safety Policy in the office of former Gov. Bruce Rauner, was a career Assistant U.S. Attorney in the central district of Illinois, and held multiple diplomatic and Justice Department prosecutorial roles, including in Cairo, Egypt and Iraq.
Risley’s appointment could run through June 30, 2028 unless the legislature fills the spot permanently before then. It isn’t clear if Risley would seek a full term as LIG.
Rep. Jeff Keicher (R-Sycamore), chair of the Legislative Ethics Commission, told me on the radio Monday a committee is being set up to conduct a search for a permanent LIG.
While the two previous LIG officeholders were judges, Keicher said the next LIG should have more investigative experience.
“When you think about the role of the LIG and who has served in that role, they’ve all been former judges. Well, judges spend their career taking in information that others have gathered and rendering a verdict based on the information presented. What we need is we need an investigator. We need somebody who’s got a good “spidey sense” about who we need to go find what we need to go look into and ask that next question,” he said. “Risley has done that in some of these prior roles. I would almost say the perfect LIG is, you know, a retired ISP investigator or detective from a, a local police force, [or] someone from the FBI who has stepped away from their job and retired early. We need somebody who’s truly an investigator that can follow a logical chain of occurrences in a complaint to get down to the heart of the matter. I don’t know that a judge is necessarily the right role exclusively to be charged with that duty.”
When contacted Monday evening, Risley said he wouldn’t comment until he assumes the office October 1.
