When we learned that the trial of Jussie Smollett was finally going to begin, I found myself leaning toward one prediction that was probably on the minds of most of us. Get ready for some weird stuff. The entire story, including the defense efforts suggested by Smollett’s attorneys, was simply too bizarre for words to begin with. How the entire allegedly hoaxed “hate crime” would be described and defended in court would almost certainly prove equally bewildering. Now that the proceedings have gotten underway, the anticipated oddness has already begun coming to light. Take for example the line of inquiry and the time spent discussing a hot sauce bottle that was found near the scene of the alleged crime by a reporter. How could this possibly be related to anything pertinent? (NY Post)

The defense at Jussie Smollett’s trial on Tuesday grilled a city police detective over a key piece of evidence that was recovered by a Post reporter.

A hot sauce bottle with the odor of bleach was found by the reporter more than a week after an alleged attack on Jan. 29, 2019, where the “Empire” star claimed two men splashed him with the chemical and hurled racist and homophobic slurs.

Smollett’s attorney Nenye Uche asked city police Detective Michael Theis, one of the lead investigators in the case, if a hot sauce bottle was used to contain the bleach. The detective replied yes, and then responded that police hadn’t found the evidence.

Yes, we’re seriously having a discussion about a hot sauce bottle. But just like almost everything else in this bizarre case, it doesn’t seem to make very much sense.

The bottle in question reportedly smelled of bleach or something like bleach. And as the investigation wore on, the Osundairo brothers would admit that they had used a hot sauce bottle in the “attack.” But my first question would be… why bleach? What part of a supposedly racist hate crime attack committed by Trump supporters would involve pouring bleach on someone? Were they trying to ruin his shirt so he’d have to buy a new one?

And then there’s the bottle itself. Hot sauce bottles tend to be small and their spouts are purposely designed to only dispense liquid in drops. If you wanted to dump a small amount of bleach on somebody, you’d probably be there for a while before you could douse them with very much, right?

The timing is also rather questionable. We know the date of the alleged attack, but the Post reporter who found it and called to turn it over to the police didn’t come across it until nine days later. Is it possible that a discarded hot sauce bottle could remain on the ground near the street for nine days undisturbed? I suppose so. City streets tend to accumulate trash. But if that detail hadn’t been released to the public at that point, what would have been going through someone’s mind to see one on the sidewalk and suddenly think, ‘Aha! I bet that’s some evidence in that Jussie Smollett case we’ve been hearing about!’

In court, the judge sustained an objection from the prosecution when Smollett’s attorney tried to ask whether the reporter had been yelled at by detectives when calling to report the discovery of the bottle. The Post stands by that claim, but it wasn’t verified in court. Why on earth would the Chicago PD yell at someone who was potentially offering material evidence relating to a case that they were hot and heavy into investigating?

As I said above, nothing about the entrance of the mysterious hot sauce bottle into this case makes any sense. But even if it did, since the Osundairo brothers have already admitted they were the ones who “attacked” Smollett and said that they had used such a bottle to do so, why is the bottle even an issue at this point?