Citizen Sheila O’Brien shows that you, too, can demand a special prosecutor
The shabby, endless Jussie Smollett story has at least taught us one thing:
Anyone can petition the courts for the appointment of a special prosecutor and subpoena big shots to appear in front of a judge.
I, for one, was misled by the fact that Sheila O’Brien, the woman behind the effort to bring Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx to account for her handling of the Smollett case, was not just anyone, but a retired Illinois appellate court judge.
I assumed she had special standing in the legal system to formally issue a call for the appointment of a special prosecutor, but no. “I’m just a private citizen,” she said when I reached out to ask about it. Her initiative was put on hold Thursday when Cook County Judge LeRoy Martin Jr. agreed to consider O’Brien’s demand that he recuse himself from the case because his son works as a prosecutor in Foxx’s office.
“I’m just a private citizen acting as a private citizen,” she said. “It’s actually a user-friendly system if you know your way around it. If you have a case, you can subpoena people — I served mine myself — then they can file to have the subpoena quashed (as Foxx has), and it goes from there.”
Citizen O’Brien, like a lot of her fellow citizens, including me, still wants to know why Foxx abruptly dropped a seemingly strong case against TV actor Smollett alleging that he staged a high-profile hate crime against himself. Foxx and her office have offered various partial and unsatisfactory explanations, giving rise to the view that Smollett got special treatment because he’s a celebrity (or was until this story turned his name into a punchline).
She may well fail. Foxx is contesting O’Brien’s call, citing the precedence of an ongoing review by the county’s independent inspector general.
This would all be so much simpler and faster if Foxx would just open up in a lengthy interview. But that is not her way.
Ignorance is an excuse … to go ahead with impeachment
“Trump has done nothing wrong!” “Mueller has exonerated him, so let it go!” “What part of ‘no collusion, no obstruction’ don’t you understand?”
Angry messages like this from supporters of Donald Trump came quickly and furiously in response to an item in my column last Sunday in which I laid out the reasons House Democrats should begin impeachment proceedings even though Senate Republicans would be certain, ultimately, to acquit the president.
Now, I get the argument that says Trump’s transgressions aren’t worth the political upheaval of commencing a futile effort to remove him from office. I get the argument that says we leave the question of Trump’s fitness for office up to the voters in November 2020.
I don’t agree with those arguments, but I respect them as considered differences with my own view. But what I don’t get and can’t respect is the argument that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report supports the contention that Trump has followed and respected the law while in office.
In fact, Mueller’s report lays out at least 10 incidents that smacked of an effort to obstruct the investigation into the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russians who interfered with the 2016 election.
Let me leave it to Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, a former judge, to sum up the highlights:
Mueller found that Trump attempted “to slow down, impede, negate, or interfere with the investigation,” Napolitano said in a recent online-only commentary. “That’s a serious allegation of criminal activity. So when the president asked his former (deputy national security) adviser K.T. McFarland to write an untruthful letter to the file knowing the government would subpoena it, that’s obstruction of justice. When the president asked Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign manager, to get Mueller fired, that’s obstruction of justice. When the president asked his then-White House counsel to get Mueller fired and then lie about, that’s obstruction of justice. When he asked (White House counsel) Don McGahn to go back to the special counsel and change his testimony, that’s obstruction of justice. When he dangled a pardon in front of (his former attorney) Michael Cohen in order to keep Cohen from testifying against him, that’s obstruction of justice.”
Mueller cagily explained that “fairness concerns counseled against” directly accusing the president of crimes because Justice Department guidelines say that a sitting president can’t be indicted. So making such an accusation would deprive Trump of the “opportunity for public nameclearing before an impartial adjudicator,” he wrote.
He also wrote, “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment.”
The wrathful notes in my inbox have been telling me that the thinly veiled implication here has eluded a great many people. And that it was an effective strategy for U.S. Attorney General and volunteer Trump surrogate William Barr to spin the report as more or less an exoneration of the president before he released a redacted version of it April 18.
But in fact “this moment has found us,” as U.S. Rep. Jared Huffshould man, D-California, told The New York Times. “We cannot ignore it. We cannot wish it away . ... This is why we have a House of Representatives. And this is absolutely what our founders imagined when a president did these sorts of things.”
The best and perhaps only way for Democrats to fill the information vacuum created by Barr and sustained by incurious Trumpkins is to plunge ahead with impeachment proceedings that will fully air the evidence against Trump in advance of the voters’ judgment next year.
The “Trump has done nothing wrong!” crowd ought to be enthusiastic about this opportunity for actual vindication and thrilled at the prospect of a political faceplant by the Democrats.
Yet they’re not. They’re foaming at those of us encouraging the Democrats to be bold.
I don’t wonder why.
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s online reader poll for funniest tweet is, “Bathroom hand dryers come in two settings: Hurricane or elderly man with emphysema,” by @DrakeGatsby. The victory for this tweet comes a little more than a week after the Guardian published “Hand dryers vs. paper towels — The surprisingly dirty fight for the right to dry your hands,” a 6,300-word article that will tell you lots you wish you didn’t know about public bathrooms.
To receive an email alert after each new tweet poll is posted, go to chicagotribune.com/newsletters and sign up under Change of Subject. The newsletter also will tell you how to find and listen to the award-winning “Mincing Rascals” podcast hosted, this week, for the first and maybe last time, by me.