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Mayor Brandon Johnson's emails mentioning McDonald's

City of Chicago·Illinois FOIA (5 ILCS 140) ·F155072-100726
filed October 7, 2026·closed October 19, 2026 ·partially released ·2 documents, 1,084 pages
#chicago #brandon-johnson #mayors-office #mcdonalds #illinois-foia No fee was charged.

One release, two documents, 1,084 pages, covering May 2023 to October 2026. The emails account for 1,081 of those pages, and 59 of them contain one of the requested terms.

The volume is almost entirely the Mayor's Press Office daily news clips digest, 18 editions between August 5 and November 15, 2024, in which the chain appears inside press coverage rather than in correspondence. The remainder is subscription newsletters that mention it in passing, including The Daily Line, The Well News and Axios, and constituent letters to the mayor on unrelated subjects whose quoted threads carry one of the terms. One message is addressed to the chain's chief executive at his corporate address.

Other correspondents on the released pages include members of the City Council, Chicago Police district CAPS mailboxes, the Illinois governor's office, and federal offices at the Department of Justice, DEA, ATF and Homeland Security.

Redactions are applied throughout under five sections of the Act. Personal contact details, third-party names and personal events are blacked out, as are the names of officers assigned to the mayor's security detail.

ⓘ Written by Claude (Opus 5) on 2026-10-19 from the documents below. It describes what the records are, not what they mean. Machine-written and not checked line by line. The documents are the record, this is only a finding aid.

  1. // 2026
  2. OCT 07

    Request submitted to the Office of the Mayor

    filed · F155072-100726

    Filed through the Chicago Public Records portal for every email sent or received by Mayor Brandon Johnson since May 15, 2023, the start of his term, referencing the McDonald's restaurant chain or McDonald's Corporation. The request listed the terms to search, being "McDonald's", "McDonalds", "Mc Donalds", "MCD" and "Golden Arches", and asked that emails mentioning people with the surname McDonald be excluded unless they also referenced the chain.

  3. OCT 08 – OCT 16 · acknowledged, extension
    1. OCT 08

      Received by the office

      acknowledged

      The response letter records the request as reaching the Office of the Mayor the day after it was submitted.

    2. OCT 16

      Five-day extension

      extension

      The office took the extension allowed by 5 ILCS 140/3(e), checking one ground: that the request could not be met within the 3(d) time limits without unduly burdening or interfering with its operations.

  4. OCT 19

    Partial release, 1,084 pages

    partial release · withheld under 7(1)(b), 7(1)(c), 7(1)(d)(v), 7(1)(d)(vi), 7(1)(v)

    Released with redactions under five sections of the Act. Section 7(1)(b) covers private information, applied to personal cell numbers, home addresses and personal email addresses. Section 7(1)(c) covers personal information whose release would be an unwarranted invasion of privacy, applied to personal events and third-party names. Sections 7(1)(d)(vi) and 7(1)(d)(v) cover danger to life or physical safety and specialised investigative techniques, applied to the names of officers assigned to the mayor's detail. Section 7(1)(v) covers security measures, applied to information about the detail's members. The letter sets out review rights before the Public Access Counselor.

    open →

ⓘ Documents are unaltered agency releases. The timelines, titles, descriptions and summaries around them are written by Claude from those records and checked by me.

Records released by the City of Chicago Office of the Mayor under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act (5 ILCS 140). Chicago publishes the text of every FOIA request it receives and asserts no copyright in these records. Note that 17 U.S.C. § 105, which places federal works outside copyright, does not apply to municipal records.

Released documents occasionally contain material an agency didn't intend to release, or third-party work that isn't a government record. If something here shouldn't be, tell me and I'll take it down. george.main@gemiv.net

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