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Her stable office is decorated with mementos from her career, with trophies, framed photos of her horses and husband with former Chicago Bears stars like Mike Ditka, and a lock of mane from Black Tie Affair. She used to tend a rose garden and hanging ferns around the stables, and kept goats that would stay in stables with the horses to keep them calm. At age 73, she still puts on her black boots and red cowboy hat to check on the horses every day, watching them work out and getting them ready to race.

“Hard things are hard,” said Jarrett, who has deep roots in Chicago and worked in the Obama White House. “The challenges presented were challenges that we were prepared to overcome, and we have. And so, no, I never heard a single time where President Obama wavered in his commitment to deliver this world-class center on this site and in this location.”

To further his goal of recruiting girls for sex, Kelly depended on his team to keep victims in line, Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Geddes said in her closing argument, which stretched for 6 1/2 hours over two days. They helped keep them confined to rooms in his Olympia Fields mansion, handed out copies of Kelly’s bizarre “rules,” carried backpacks filled with iPads Kelly used to film sexual encounters, and even offered condoms to one victim before she went in to see Kelly, Geddes said.

A state audit covering the early months of the pandemic, released in July, found IDES paid hundreds of claims to people whose birthdays would have made them older than 90 or younger than 14, sometimes just weeks old. Lawmakers have since directed state auditors to do a deeper review of IDES’ unemployment programs after Senate Republicans accused the administration of Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, of hiding the scope of problems.