A FOXX IN THE HEN HOUSE: PROBE
Prosecutor dropped Jussie raps after texts with his sis
Cook County, Ill., State’s Attorney Kim Foxx engaged in “substantial abuses” in her handling of the Jussie Smollett case, including speaking with his sister eight times after the actor turned from victim to suspect, a special prosecutor announced on Monday.
Shortly after Smollett told the Chicago Police Department that he was the victim of a brutal hate crime in the city in January 2019, his actress sister, Jurnee Smollett, reached out to Foxx for assistance, concerned that private information about the case was being leaked, said Dan Webb, the special prosecutor assigned to reinvestigate the case.
Foxx repeatedly claimed those discussions ended when police started investigating Jussie for allegedly faking a hate crime against himself, but it turns out she continued speaking with Jurnee, who starred in “Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey,” well after Jussie was considered a suspect, Webb said.
“State’s Attorney Foxx learned by Feb. 8, 2019, that Mr. Smollett had become a suspect in CPD’s investigation, yet she continued communicating with Ms. Smollett through Feb. 13, 2019, including via five text messages and three phone calls,” Webb said in a statement.
“State’s Attorney Foxx then made false statements to the media claiming she ceased all communications with Ms. Smollett as soon as she learned that Mr. Smollett was a suspect in CPD’s investigation and no longer merely a victim.”
Text messages previously obtained by The Post through public-records requests show an unidentified Smollett family member asking Foxx to talk on Feb. 12, 2019.
Foxx sent back a chipper response two hours later saying she was “free” and apologized for the delay in replying, the texts show. The following day, Foxx again said she was available to talk.
The blunder was just one of many found by Webb’s office after he was tapped by Chicago Judge Michael Toomin last summer to reprobe the case amid widespread outcry over how it was handled.
In January of last year, Jussie Smollett, then a star of the TV series “Empire,” alleged that he was beaten by two men who yelled racist and homophobic slurs while dousing him with bleach and throwing a noose around his neck.
The tale made headlines across the country, but it soon fell apart, with police alleging it was fantasy cooked up by the actor to get him a pay bump on the Fox show.
He was charged with 16 felony counts of disorderly conduct for making false statements to police.
Foxx’s office insisted it had a strong case against the actor, but dropped all charges against him on March 26 last year, with little explanation and no acknowledgment of guilt from him.
Toomin later ruled that the case was rife with “unprecedented irregularities” and that a special prosecutor was needed to determine whether new charges against Smollett were warranted and if Foxx and her office acted illegally or improperly.
Webb’s team brought new charges against Smollett in February and just wrapped up his probe into Foxx.
While there’s no evidence Foxx and her office broke any laws, Webb found five instances of abuse committed by her office.
The first instance was the dropping of the charges against Smollett when no new evidence had emerged since his indictment.
“Almost across the board, lawyers who currently work in or previously worked in the CCSAO’s [Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office] criminal division who were interviewed by the OSP [Office of the Special Prosecutor] — including State’s Attorney Foxx — were ‘surprised’ or ‘shocked’ by at least some facet of the dismissal terms,” Webb wrote.
Furthermore, acting State’s Attorney Joseph Magats and lead prosecutor Risa Lanier, the two people in charge of the case, had “significantly and meaningfully” divergent accounts for how the decision to drop charges was reached, Webb said.
Webb added that Lanier’s decision to draft a statement on the dismissal in conjunction with Smollett’s counsel was “atypical.”
The second instance of alleged abuse came when Foxx’s office, in explaining the reason for the dismissal, claimed that Smollett’s case was similar to 5,700 others referred for “alternative prosecution.”
“There were not thousands of (or, arguably any) similar cases that the CCSAO resolved in a similar way to the Initial Smollett Case.
The CCSAO could not identify any specific similar CCSAO cases it relied upon when resolving the Initial Smollett Case,” Webb found.
Foxx’s office also falsely stated that the $10,000 in restitution Smollett paid was the maximum amount it could request, Webb alleged, noting no such cap exists in any existing statutes.
The third finding of abuse was related to Foxx’s decision to recuse herself and appoint Magats, her No. 2, to act in her stead instead of a special prosecutor, even though Foxx knew the choice was “legally defective,” Webb said.
“Instead of implementing the proper legal course to carry out the recusal once this defect was brought to their attention, the CCSAO and State’s Attorney Foxx made the decision to ignore this major legal defect seemingly because they did not want to admit that they had made such a major mistake of judgment regarding State’s Attorney Foxx’s recusal,” Webb wrote, adding Foxx and her office went on to lie to the media, including The Post, about it.
Finally, Webb found the decisions made by Foxx, her office and Magats “may rise to the level of a violation of legal ethics” and said he would be reporting the findings to the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, which can bring action against Foxx’s office.
That office said in a statement that Webb’s report clears it of illegal actions and “puts to rest” implications of outside influence.
It also said that any false claims made to the public weren’t deliberate and that it rejected Webb’s “characterizations of its exercises of prosecutorial discretion and private or public statements as ‘abuses of discretion.’ ”
Plus, the office said, “the CCSAO has already made a number of changes to its operations, including the hiring of a new CCSAO ethics officer and more separation of their function from the administration of the office, and strengthening the recusal plan.”