Jussie Smollett says he’s going to “fight for equality.” Isn’t it now clear that some people are more equal than others? So here he is continuing to portray himself as a victim. You see, folks, this stuff doesn’t end. You think that you win something real big like the Mueller report coming out, and then in only a few short hours or days later that you are — and we are — reminded that there aren’t any lasting victories, that it is an ongoing battle. - Rush Limbaugh, 3/26/2019
FoxNews.com reports that
Tina Tchen, the attorney and former chief of staff to first lady Michelle Obama, has garnered scrutiny after messages traded with Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx — about the alleged hoax linked to actor Jussie Smollett — emerged shortly before prosecutors dropped all charges against Smollett on Tuesday.
Tchen started practicing law in 1983, after she graduated from Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, and currently leads the Chicago branch of Buckley LLC. In between, she worked in the Obama White House, first as the director of the Office of Public Engagement and later as the first lady’s chief of staff.
Given her comprehensive legal background, her influence on the investigation into the allegations of fraud against Jussie Smollett has raised eyebrows in the Windy City.
Public records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times showed that Tchen sent Foxx an early-morning text on Feb. 1 saying she “wanted to give you a call on behalf of Jussie Smollett and family who I know. They have concerns about the investigation.” Three days earlier, Smollett had said two men attacked him on the way home.
Later that day, the Sun-Times reported that a relative of Smollett sent Foxx a text, sparking a relationship that eventually led to Foxx recusing herself from the investigation and prosecution. Foxx also was shown to have emailed Tchen: “Spoke to [Chicago Police] Superintendent [Eddie] Johnson. I convinced him to reach out to FBI to ask that they take over the investigation. He is reaching out now and will get to me shortly.”
Prosecutors on Tuesday abruptly dropped all charges against Smollett after the “Empire” actor — accused of faking a racist, anti-gay attack on himself — agreed to do volunteer service and to let the city keep his $10,000 in bail, in a decision that sparked outrage among Johnson and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, among others. The prosecutors gave no detailed explanation for why they abandoned the case only five weeks after filing the charges and threatening to pursue Smollett for the cost of a monthlong investigation, adding that said they still believe Smollett concocted the assault.
Tchen’s motivations for reaching out to Foxx were unknown. Other links between the two were unclear. Tchen did not respond to multiple interview requests from Fox News and her office declined requests for comment.
Questions about any legal or ethical impropriety remained unresolved. The Illinois ethical code for attorneys’ states: “A lawyer shall not engage in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice.”
Jim Grogan, the deputy administrator and chief counsel at the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, said the law typically applies to attorneys who obfuscate and encumber the legal process by wasting the court’s time. He’s not aware of any precedent in Illinois regarding an attorney who has no clients in the case.
It’s unclear if Tchen was representing anyone in the Smollett family when she reached out to Foxx.
“The fun thing about that rule is that it’s so broadly written,” Grogan said. “You’ve got to say to yourself, what’s my role as a lawyer being involved in all this?”
She knew her role, Mr. Grogan.
It was to get Jussie Smollett off the hook.
This is not the first time that the Obamas have interjected themselves in a local police matter.
On July 16, 2009, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his Cambridge, Massachusetts home by local police officer Sgt. James Crowley, who was responding to a 9-1-1 caller’s report of men breaking and entering the residence. The arrest initiated a series of events that gained an international spotlight because of the involvement of Barack Hussein Obama, the President of the United States of America.
“I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that,” Obama said after Gates’s arrest. “But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home, and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”
…He scheduled an event at the White House dubbed the “beer summit” and invited Gates and the officer who arrested him to have a conversation with him and Vice President Biden.
…News of the arrest set off a national debate about racial profiling that consumed the first summer of Obama’s presidency.
Six days after the arrest, Obama held a conference to talk about health care and was asked about the Gates arrest. He gave his comments, which he later said he regretted.
The beer summit yielded fuzzy photographs of the four men drinking and eating peanuts. But the lasting impression was that the president had stepped into a divisive racial debate for which he was unprepared.
And, now, they just got a man guilty of attempting to cause more racial division in this country off the hook.
While Obama and his wife lived in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they showed that they were both quite adept at fanning the fires of racial division, especially after the shooting of the thug Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent incidences in Baltimore and New York.
Unfortunate incidences all turned into rhetorical bonfires by President Obama and the Democratic Party, eager to use these moments of racial division to split the country at the seems in order to gain political power.
However, in the case of Jussie Smollett, the Obamas are no longer the First Couple of our nation, so they have to practice covert Machiavellian manipulations from their “command center” a couple of blocks away from the White House.
Just as they did during Obamas run for the Illinois Senate Seat and during the 8 long years of the Obama Administration, the Obamas used “Chicago Politics” to skirt the rules in order to provide a desired outcome…
…”by whatever means necessary.”
Until He Comes,
KJ
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