Rahm Emanuel says he won’t resign

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said on Wednesday he won’t step down amid growing calls for his resignation.

{mosads}In a visibly tense interview at a Politico Illinois event in Chicago, Emanuel, who served as President Obama’s chief of staff, said he would be held accountable by the political process.

“We have a process called the election,” Emanuel said. “The voters spoke. I’ll be held accountable for the decisions and actions that I make.”

Emanuel asked on Tuesday for the resignation of Chicago’s top cop Superintendent Garry McCarthy in response to the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, an African-American teen who was shot 16 times by a white police officer.

“Well, as I said yesterday and as I’ve said over the two years, a lot of people over a year asked me, or two years, to fire the superintendent,” Emanuel said at the event.

“He has become the issue rather than dealing with the issue,” he added of McCarthy.

It took 13 months for video of the October 2014 shooting to be released to the public. Emanuel said the video was withheld in order to ensure the integrity of the investigation was not compromised.

Jason Van Dyke, the officer who shot McDonald, was charged with first-degree murder hours before the video was released.

In a scathing editorial on Tuesday, The New York Times called the incident a “cover-up” and said Emanuel’s response to the shooting, “either by design or because of negligence, was to do as little as possible.”

Emanuel, who was reelected in February, declined to speculate on Wednesday whether he would have won the mayor race if video of the shooting had surfaced prior to the election.

“That’s a hypothetical I can’t answer,” he said.

At one point during the interview, Emanuel also became upset at reporters for disclosing where he will vacation with his family over the holidays.

“Well, first of all, thanks for telling everybody what I’m going to do with my family,” he said. “You just had a private conversation with me, and now you’ve decided to make that public. I really don’t appreciate that.”