{"id":340887,"date":"2010-02-19T16:49:40","date_gmt":"2010-02-19T21:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c60fd53ef0120a8b826a8970b"},"modified":"2010-02-19T16:49:40","modified_gmt":"2010-02-19T21:49:40","slug":"durbin-aide-reassigned-after-flirtatious-relationship-with-underling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/340887","title":{"rendered":"Durbin aide reassigned after flirtatious relationship with underling"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Posted by John Byrne<\/em> at 3:45 p.m.<\/p>\n<p>A longtime top aide to U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin has been reassigned but will remain in a senior advisory role after an internal examination showed he had a flirtatious relationship with a subordinate.<\/p>\n<p>Durbin&#8217;s Illinois director, Mike Daly, showed &quot;a lack of judgment&quot; in his Chicago office dealings with 29-year-old aide Kathleen Rooney, according to Durbin spokesman Joe Shoemaker.<\/p>\n<p>The senator ordered his staff to interview Rooney, Daly and other employees<br \/>\nin his Chicago office after Shoemaker read Rooney&#8217;s book, &quot;For You, For<br \/>\nYou I am Trilling These Songs.&quot; In one essay, Rooney writes of her &quot;unrequitable (but not unrequited)&quot; love for her boss, who is not named.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Rooney was fired Feb. 5 for violating U.S. Senate rules by personally benefiting from her Senate job through a book that focused on her work there, Shoemaker said.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>All involved insisted &quot;there was no sexual harassment or harassment of any kind&quot; in their interactions, which amounted to nothing more than flirting, but Durbin decided it would nonetheless be best to move Daly out of a position in which he has direct supervision over other employees, Shoemaker said.<br \/><\/br>\u00a0<br \/><\/br>Daly, who has worked for Durbin for 27 years, could not be reached for comment today.<br \/><\/br>\u00a0<br \/><\/br>Rooney described her relationship with Daly as &quot;kind of a complicated, but not complaint-worthy, situation.&quot;<br \/><\/br>\u00a0<br \/><\/br>She said the two were friendly during her off-and-on work in Durbin&#8217;s small Chicago office, which began with a 1999 summer internship. Rooney returned to the senator&#8217;s staff most recently in 2007 as a staff member.<br \/><\/br>\u00a0<br \/><\/br>&quot;I found it a situation worth making sense of in an essay,&quot; said Rooney, who also wrote &quot;Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America,&quot; two books of poetry and a non-fiction work about her time as a nude model for artists.<br \/><\/br>\u00a0<br \/><\/br>Rooney said she asked to be terminated because a resignation comes with a non-disclosure agreement and she wants to continue writing about her time in Durbin&#8217;s office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Posted by John Byrne at 3:45 p.m. A longtime top aide to U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin has been reassigned but will remain in a senior advisory role after an internal examination showed he had a flirtatious relationship with a subordinate. Durbin&#8217;s Illinois director, Mike Daly, showed &quot;a lack of judgment&quot; in his Chicago office dealings [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3992,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3992"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}