The Mayor Had Much To Say…
Mayor Rahm Emanuel then gave his take on the situation:
“I’d like to remind everybody that a Grand Jury indicted this individual based on…only a piece of the evidence that police had collected in that period of time. So a Grand Jury actually brought the charges.”
Emanuel then addressed the $10,000 bond that Jussie forfeited to the city as part of his plea bargain:
“On financial costs, this ten thousand dollars doesn’t even come close to what the city spent in resources to actually look over the camera, gather all the data, gather all the information that actually brought the indictment by the Grand Jury on many, many multiple different charges.”
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is furious: "Mr. Smollett is still saying that he is innocent. Still running down the Chicago police department. How dare him. How dare him … Is there no decency in this man?" pic.twitter.com/NWJixmN6Od
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) March 26, 2019
The mayor then slammed Jussie for betraying the law and the public’s trust for “self promotion”:
“…The ethical cost is as a person in the House of Representatives, when we try to pass a ‘Shepard Legislation’ that dealt with hate crimes, putting them on the books, that President Obama then signed into law- to then use those very laws and the principles behind the ‘Matthew Shepard hate crime legislation’ to self promote your career, is a cost that comes to all individuals.
Gay men and women- who will come forward and one day say they were a victim of a hate crime, who will now be doubted. People of faith- Muslim or any other religious faith- will be a victim of hate crimes. People of all walks of life and backgrounds- race, ethnicity, sexual orientation- now this casts a shadow of whether they’re telling the truth and he did this all in the name of self promotion.
And he used the laws of the hate crime legislation that all of us, collectively over the years, have put on the books, to stand to be the values that embody what we believe in. This is a whitewash of justice.”
The State Attorney Office’s decision, to drop all of the charges, has directly thrown Chicago’s law enforcement, detectives, it’s mayor, and possibly the FBI (which is currently investigating hate mail Jussie is suspected of mailing to himself) under the bus. So it’s understandable why the Superitendent and Mayor are speaking out.
I suspect that there will probably be even more details surfacing in the coming days.
