Samantha Steele: her Indiana Money Trail
- Nick Cicero
- Dec 1
- 3 min read
Cook County Board of Review Commissioner Samantha Steele is facing scrutiny over a nexus of ethics violations involving her lucrative, undisclosed network of Indiana government consulting contracts. An investigative report by the Cook County Office of the Independent Inspector General (OIIG) (link) exposed the ethical lapses of Samantha Steele, there identified as "BOR Official A." Subsequent reporting from the Chicago Tribune (link) explicitly identified Commissioner Samantha Steele as the subject of the Inspector General report, which found her failures to disclose her parallel career a breach of her fiduciary duty to Cook County residents.
🏛️ The Ethics Breach: Failure to Disclose
The OIIG’s July 2025 quarterly report, summarizing investigation IIG24-0433, lays out the core findings: BOR Official A (Samantha Steele) failed to disclose both a position with another state government and multiple municipal consulting contracts on her 2022, 2023, and 2024 Statements of Economic Interests.
Specifically, the report found that Steele:
Undisclosed Position: Held a simultaneous position as a commissioner (including roles as chair and vice chair) on the Lake County, Indiana Property Tax Board of Appeals, which she failed to list on her required Cook County ethics forms.
Undisclosed Clients: Operated her private firm, The Leonor Group, which received contracts with several municipalities. While her 2024 filing acknowledged her ownership of the firm, it omitted the specific Indiana government units paying the business, a requirement under the Illinois Governmental Ethics Act.
The OIIG did not conclude this was a mere oversight. By omitting these outside posts and contracts, the Inspector General found that BOR Official A violated the Cook County Ethics Ordinance and breached her fiduciary duty to the county. The OIIG recommended she file amended statements immediately.
According to the report, Samantha Steele, through her counsel, rejected the inspector general’s legal analysis and flatly declined to amend her required public filings.
💰 A Web of Deals: The Indiana Connection
The failure to disclose is not just a paperwork issue; it shields a much deeper pattern of financial relationships connecting Commissioner Steele’s private firm, The Leonor Group, to four distinct government bodies across the state line in Indiana, all while she wields significant power over property tax appeals in Cook County. The pattern is consistent: Indiana public bodies paid Steele's private firm significant sums for tax consulting work, and shortly thereafter, individuals linked to those same offices were placed on her Cook County Board of Review payroll.
Indiana Government Unit | Steele's Firm Payouts | Tie to Cook County Hiring |
Lake County | Approx. $315,050 (Jan 2023) | Hired Lake County Assessor LaTonya Spearman's daughter, Aarion Stines, onto the Cook County payroll. |
Ross Township | Approx. $128,950 (2023-2024) | Hired the sister of Ross Township Assessor Angela Guernsey, Nicole Ooms, onto the Cook County payroll. |
Portage Township | Approx. $843,850 (Jul 2023-Nov 2024) | Hired former Porter County Assessor Jon Snyder as an analyst, despite his recent federal conviction for corruption. Snyder was later fired after media scrutiny. |
Hancock County | Approx. $14,350 | Pushed the Cook County Board of Review to contract with consultant Kathleen Molinder, without disclosing she was simultaneously Molinder’s client for work in Hancock County. |
Specific Concerns:
In Lake County, Steele's firm received over $300,000 for an audit on the BP refinery site. Records cited in a related complaint indicate the work was done two years beyond the legal deadline for that tax year, resulting in no new taxable value for Lake County—yet her firm was paid in full.
In Portage Township, the staggering sum of approximately $843,850 was paid to The Leonor Group, followed by Steele hiring the man who approved those funds, former Porter County Assessor Jon Snyder, whose background included a federal corruption conviction.
🛑 Steele Refuses to Comply with the State Ethics Act
Commissioner Steele was an elected property-tax appeals official in Cook County while simultaneously serving on an Indiana tax appeals board and being a paid contractor to multiple Indiana government units. The official responsible for judging tax appeals in Cook County allegedly built a parallel business quietly collecting large government checks out-of-state, failed to list those government clients as required by law, and is now actively fighting ethics enforcers rather than simply disclosing the full extent of her outside business to the public she serves.
The key finding of the Inspector General remains: Samantha Steele's deliberate and persistent failure to disclose the outside governmental posts and contracts, shielding her many financial and professional entanglements.