Last week Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx appeared on a Chicago Sun-Times podcast where she let people know how she really feels about the Jussie Smollett case. “This issue with Smollett, cause I’ll just take it head on, we’ve got 12 days left, is—excuse my language—is bulls**t.” One of Kim Foxx’s rivals in the Cook County State’s Attorney primary, Bill Conway, has just introduced a new campaign ad quoting that portion of her comments.
“The reputation of the city of Chicago wasn’t marred by Jussie Smollett,” Foxx says in the ad, as her image is plastered to the screen. Then the commercial features a mashup of news reports from when the high-profile, nationally watched case was unfolding…
In her interview with Joravsky last week, Foxx expressed disappointment that it’s been a year since the Smollett incident happened and yet it has become the focus of many interviews and conversations. The commercial highlights a part of her quote, but in the 40-minute interview, she said much more about the case.
“This issue with Smollett … ’cause I’ll just take it head on … we’ve got 12 days left … is … excuse my language … is bull—-. Sorry,” she said. “Hold me accountable. Absolutely. We could have done a better job of explaining how this fits in the context of the work that we do. And in the process of doing it, we owed a greater level of transparency to the people of Cook County.”
Foxx has been claiming for a year that her treatment of Smollett was just like that of any other low level offender. That excuse held up a lot better before a special prosecutor filed six new charges of disorderly conduct against him last month. Here’s what the Chicago Tribune said about that at the time:
A statement from Webb, a former U.S. attorney here, opens the candidate to fresh accusations of incompetence if not deceit: Foxx has maintained that her office treated Smollett the way it treats other defendants every day. She has made much of that claim.
Yet Webb says her state’s attorney’s office couldn’t point to those comparable cases.
Webb’s conclusion contradicts Foxx’s statement to WBEZ on March 27, 2019, that “every single day … there are people who get similar arrangements, people who get diversion, people who get sentences that are probably not what some people would want. Every single day.”
Webb is saying Foxx’s office had no precedent or consistent policy to justify letting Smollett off the hook — but did it anyway.
Smollett didn’t get the same treatment others get despite the fact that his case attracted international attention but she just keeps claiming he did. And with the election just a week away, now she’s claiming it’s all BS. Here’s the new ad put out by Bill Conway.
Finally, here’s the full interview with the Sun-Times podcast. The section where Foxx call the Smollett case BS comes about two hours and five minutes in to this.
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