By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday,
November 30, 2021
The Jussie Smollett hate-crime hoax
occurred nearly three years ago. From the first reports, the vast
majority of Chicagoans figured out his story sounded fishy at best — among
other oddities, the alleged MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporters who recognized
him from his TV show Empire chose to perpetuate their attacks
at 2 a.m. on the city’s coldest night in many years (it
was nine degrees
below zero, without the wind chill).
Because the first prosecutor to examine
the fraudulent claims chose to give him a sweetheart deal, Smollett is only
seeing the inside of a courtroom now, and our Ryan Mills is
in Chicago covering the story. And this is a bigger deal than it may seem, much more than a has-been
or never-was actor filing a false police report.
From the beginning, the hoax was soaked
through with politics, a deliberate, if spectacularly implausible, attempt to
manufacture an event to advance a narrative as well as a not-so-successful
actor’s career. Jussie Smollett wanted the world to believe that America — even
the streets of Chicago at 2 a.m. on the coldest winter’s night
— is full of hateful, racist, homophobic, Donald Trump-supporting thugs who
will violently ambush and attack people just because of who they are, carrying nooses
and menacingly chanting, “This is MAGA country!”
Now, I have no doubt that in a country of
329 million people, if you looked hard enough, you could find people who fit
the description in Jussie Smollett’s imagination. We have hateful people in
this country, as well as people who are racist and homophobic. But we do not
have a commonplace problem of hateful, racist, homophobic, Donald
Trump-supporting thugs, carrying nooses and menacingly chanting, “This is MAGA
country!” as they rampage through the streets of our cities, looking for
victims . . . or at least these thugs have the good sense to stay indoors in
the middle of the night in winter in downtown Chicago.
Things are bad enough in this world, and
we have enough real villains. We don’t need to make up imaginary new villains
and try to fool people into believing that the world is worse than it actually
is.
The existence of hate-crime hoaxes does not mean that every report of a hate crime is false, and the
existence of actual hate crimes does not mean that every report of a hate crime
is true. We live in a world that has genuinely hateful perpetrators, and we
live in a world that has people who will make up stories and pose as victims in
order to get attention. Our duty as responsible citizens is to sort out what
actually happened and resist the urge to jump to conclusions.
It’s tempting! Our brains have
evolved to quickly come to conclusions based upon incomplete information, to make inferences and generalizations. But American history is full of cautionary tales about the danger of jumping to
conclusions. The danger of the public jumping to conclusions about crimes
offers a lot of fodder for our popular culture — The Ox-Bow Incident, Twelve Angry Men, The Fugitive. (I guess the lesson is that if you’re going to be falsely accused, you
had better have Henry Fonda around.)
The first reason the Smollett trial
matters is because it showcases a false and dark vision of the world that
certain influential people want to be true. Instead of asking, “Wait, does this
description make sense?” quite a few powerful figures in politics effectively
signed off on Smollett’s strange account from the first telling.
Back in 2019, Joe Biden tweeted, “What happened today to Jussie
Smollett must never be tolerated in this country. We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe
harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our
hearts. We are with you, Jussie.”
Kamala Harris tweeted, “Jussie
Smollett is one of the kindest, most gentle human beings I know. I’m praying for his quick recovery. This was an attempted modern day
lynching. No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexuality
or color of their skin. We must confront this hate.”
God only knows if Biden or Harris even
read or signed off on those tweets, or whether some 20-something woke campaign
staffer wrote them on the candidates’ behalf, hoping to seize on a celebrity
crime story in a busy news cycle. But the two candidates’ rapid, instinctive
embrace of Smollett’s account revealed something troubling: that they see
America as more hateful, more dangerous, and more tarnished than it really is.
Harris backtracked a bit a month later, declaring that, “When anyone
makes false claims to the police, it not only diverts resources from serious investigations but it makes
it more difficult for other victims of crime to come forward.”
Their credulity suggests that Biden and
Harris find it plausible that racist brutes could or would really rampage
through the streets of downtown Chicago in the middle of the night, chanting
“This is MAGA country.” The president and vice president may love America, but
they also instinctively believe the worst things they hear about it.
The second reason the Smollett trial
matters is because it features one of the
most vivid and unjustifiable politicizations of the criminal-justice system in
recent memory:
In a
dramatic reversal in the case, Chicago prosecutors dropped all charges against
Smollett on March 26, 2019. Revealing little about the reason why, the Cook
County State’s Attorney’s Office said the decision came after reviewing the
case and after the actor agreed to forfeit his $10,000 bond. Parts of the case
were sealed, one of Smollett’s attorneys said.
“After
reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr.
Smollett’s volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond
to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition and
appropriate resolution to this case,” the state’s attorney’s office said in a
statement.
But Mayor
Rahm Emanuel blasted the prosecutor’s decision as a “whitewash of justice,” and
Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson accused Smollett of hiding behind a deal
“brokered . . . in secrecy.”
In that
same month, the city of Chicago said it wanted Smollett to cover the costs of
the investigation into his alleged attack — more than $130,000 — and gave him a
week to do so, kicking off a legal battle after the actor refused to pay.
Jussie Smollett embarrassed his political
allies, and once the implausibility of his story was exposed, his political
allies wanted the whole matter to disappear — and Smollett’s political allies
apparently extended into the office of Cook County state’s attorney Kim
Foxx. A subsequent
special prosecutor’s investigation found that for Smollett, established procedure was thrown out the window:
[The]
investigation yielded no evidence that would support any criminal charges
against Foxx or anyone working at her office.
It did,
however, say that it had identified three “substantial abuses of discretion and
failures” in the office’s prosecution and resolution of the case.
The
statement noted, among other points, that the dropping of the charges against
Smollett didn’t hinge on new evidence and “surprised” or “shocked” lawyers who
worked in the state’s attorney’s office criminal division.
The OSP
alleged that Foxx’s office “breached its obligations of honesty and
transparency” by making false and/or misleading statements to the public
regarding Foxx’s recusal from the case, the office’s subsequent dismissal of
the case and the extent of Foxx’s communications with Smollett’s sister, Jurnee.
The
special prosecutor said one false statement was that the relatively easy terms
for dropping the charges — including community service and a monetary penalty —
didn’t represent a new or unusual practice for the state’s attorney’s office.
The OSP
also said its evidence relating to false and misleading public statements “may
rise to the level of a violation of legal ethics by State’s Attorney Foxx and
CCSAO lawyers.”
The office
of the special prosecutor found sufficient evidence to file new charges against
Smollett.
Our Ryan Mills notes that, “For such a
high-profile case, the criminal stakes for Smollett are pretty low. The 39-year-old actor and musician faces six low-level disorderly
conduct charges. If he’s found guilty, he could be sentenced to up to three
years behind bars, but he could also receive probation and community service.”
But the outcome of this case matters for
accountability. If you want people to respect our country’s institutions, our
institutions must behave in a manner worthy of respect. Foxx’s choosing to drop
the charges in a high-profile case, with little explanation or a false
explanation, undermines faith in the rule of law and the equal application of
the law.
ADDENDUM: Sorry, CNN, but in light of this . . .
CNN
host Chris Cuomo used his connections in the media business to gather
information about the female victims of his brother Andrew Cuomo, who was
accused of sexual harassment while serving as governor of New York.
While the
TV pundit has admitted to helping his brother navigate the
allegations, documents published by the New York Attorney General’s Office
Monday reveal that Chris Cuomo was much more actively engaged in the governor’s
damage control efforts than he has previously admitted.
. . . I don’t think Brian Stelter, Chris Cillizza, or anybody else over there has any standing to give anybody else any
grief about how they cover politics. As I wrote back in May, “Chris Cuomo
just verified every accusation of every conservative critic CNN has ever had; the network became the reputational bodyguard of a notoriously corrupt
and utterly shameless Democratic official.”
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