Celebrities and powerful people, in general, are accustomed to privilege that the rest of us couldn’t dream of and it’s a gross miscarriage of justice when it happens in the courtroom. Many famous people get light slaps on the wrist.
Unfortunately, the rest of us don’t fall into that category and it’s because we’re not rich or famous. We live in a celebrity-obsessed society and that dictates their privilege in every facet of their lives.
And that privilege was on full display when a former top aide to then-First lady Michelle Obama refused a subpoena in the Jussie Smollett case.
His claim made national news, grabbing sympathy from many Hollywood elitists who jumped to far-reaching conclusions that all Trump supporters are violent and hateful.
But it turns out that Smollett hired two African immigrants – both had worked on “Empire” at some point – to stage the attack. Smollett even paid them by way of check in the amount of $3,500. This is what the Chicago Police Department uncovered in their investigation.
Consequently, he was arrested and charged with 16 felonies with the most serious of his charges is for filing a false police report, which is a Class 4 felony, the least serious of all possible felony charges, but it still carries a sentence ranging from one to three years in prison and fines up to $25,000.
It was a head-scratching moment. Even an assistant attorney in her own office publicly slammed Foxx in a scathing statement. Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel also blasted her decision to drop the charges publicly.
One speculation is that former top aide to Michelle Obama and also her chief of staff, Tina Tchen, contacted Kim Foxx on February 1st and then suddenly, magically, the case was dropped. Coincidence?
On Wednesday, Tchen refused to be served a subpoena related to her contact with Chicago prosecutor Kim Foxx in the Jussie Smollett case.
The subpoena was issued by former Illinois Appellate Judge Sheila O’Brien as part of her request for a special prosecutor to investigate the Cook County state’s attorney’s handling of Smollett’s criminal case.
O’Brien wants Tchen, to produce “any and all documents, notes, phone records, texts, tape recordings made or received at any time, concerning [Tchen’s] conversations with Kim Foxx in re: Jussie Smollett.”
But Tchen wouldn’t accept the subpoena.
In March Tchen claimed in a statement, “Shortly after Mr. Smollett reported he was attacked, as a family friend, I contacted Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who I also know from prior work together. My sole activity was to put the chief prosecutor in the case in touch with an alleged victim’s family who had concerns about how the investigation was being characterized in public.”
If that’s the truth then why not turn over the evidence and/or accept the subpoena? If that was her only chief concern then she should have no problem handing that information proving that to be the truth, right?
At best, all of this seems fishy. The good news is that also on Wednesday, Cook County Circuit Judge Steven Watkins ordered the contents of Smollett’s criminal case file to be made public. The truth will come out and we’ll see soon enough whether Foxx was in the right or wrong to dismiss the charges.