This is too good.

State Attorney Kim Foxx sent out a memo asking her office to dig up cases similar to Jussie Smollett’s. The goal was to find another whitewash job where they let someone off with just a verbal agreement and the laughable “punishment” of non-compulsory community service.

Here’s the memo.

Here's an internal email sent to supervising prosecutors in @SAKimFoxx 's office today. Ya'll better step on it. Our story is coming tonight. #JussieSmollett pic.twitter.com/EteEXpg1zN

— CWBChicago (@CWBChicago) March 27, 2019

This ties into the fact that Foxx’s office claims the treatment of Smollett was not unusual.

There was no direct response from Foxx. Her spokeswoman, Tandra Simonton, insisted that the Smollett case was treated no differently from the more than 5,700 other “cases for alternative prosecution” that the office has handled in the past two years.

“This is not a new or unusual practice,” Simonton said in a statement.

Not unusual, huh? If that’s true, why are you having to scramble to find an example, of which you still haven’t?

We need a precedent to support our decision yesterday that was based on a precedent.

— Changed My Name (@PopNFood) March 27, 2019

Going even further, the SA office claimed that such a lax outcome is available to all defendants with similar cases. Yeah, that doesn’t pass the smell test.

“We did not exonerate Mr. Smollett,” Simonton said. “The charges were dropped in return for Mr. Smollett’s agreement to do community service and forfeit his $10,000 bond to the City of Chicago. Without the completion of these terms, the charges would not have been dropped. This outcome was met under the same criteria that would occur for and is available to any defendant with similar circumstances.”

So is it true? Are they this forgiving of others in similar situations? The facts tell a very different story.

CWBChicago, who’s doing great work on this story, decided to test their theory and find out if it’s really as common and available to everyone as claimed. They found the 8 most recent cases involving false reports to the police. Here are the results.

In each case outside of Smollett, only a single felony count was involved. If you read the details at the above link about each incident, you’ll see that all these cases are objectively less serious than Smollett’s. Despite that, every single one was made to plead guilty, given a criminal record, and though none were sentenced to jail (past initial incarceration), all of them had long probation periods and far more community service than Smollett. It’s also worth noting that the community service here is real, court ordered community service. Not a verbal wink and a nod where the defendant runs off to Jesse Jackson to get a note written.

Comparatively, Smollett had 16(!) felony counts against him. He didn’t have to plead guilty, received no probation, no criminal record, got a verbal deal, and his community service was non court ordered (which we just have to trust actually happened). His case was also dropped using an emergency hearing, which was not used in any of the other cases.

Even as Foxx and her office were falsely claiming that Smollett’s deal was totally common (it’s not, as shown above), her former top aide was speaking out and telling a very different story.

In a telephone interview, Eric Sussman, Magat’s predecessor as Foxx’s top aide, said the abrupt, secretive nature of the deal “raises questions as to whether there is embarrassing information the state’s attorney’s office doesn’t want the public to know.”

“I’ve never, ever seen anything like this,” Sussman, now in private practice, said of the decision to drop charges so soon after Smollett’s indictment earlier this month.

What’s all this add up to? It equals Foxx giving Smollett a clearly corrupt verbal agreement which appears to be completely unheard of, both in it’s informal nature and in the leniency of the punishment. Despite that, Foxx is desperately trying to find a similar example, which she hasn’t been able to do yet in order to claim this was all on the up and up.

As mentioned above, if you are basing a decision on precedent, you would know what the precedent actually was. You wouldn’t have to go manufacture it.

This entire thing stinks and I only hope some kind of justice is found in the end. Kim Foxx appears to be another in a long line of corrupt Chicago politicians (make no mistake, that’s what she is). She clearly allowed others, including those connected to the Obamas, to obstruct and ultimately scuttle this investigation based on privilege that is not afforded to other, normal defendants. It’s the height of corruption and can not be allowed to stand. With the FBI now looking into this, possible federal charges on the way, and the Chicago PD fuming, this isn’t over by a long shot.