Former 'Empire' actor Jussie Smollett indicted by special prosecutor in Chicago

[marble falls]

76. You certainly suggested that I was Trump like because I don't want this prosecuted any ...

further than it was.

My claim is: Smollett has been prosecuted enough.
a. he was investigated and the prosecution decided there was no there, there.
b. the law itself doesn't call for the depth of prosecution some here want with punishment not called for in the law.
c. there are better uses of police/prosecutors/court resources for crimes that actually have victims.
d. There is no point prosecuting this for its bad effect on race relations. Because race relations are abysmal alread and didn't have a thing to with Jesse Smollett.

There is no strawman here except for the further prosecution of Smollett for all the bad reasons to prosecute him I listed above.

There certainly is no reason to prosecute because it damages the cops:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago

Public corruption and political crime

Chicago has a long history of public corruption that regularly draws the attention of federal law enforcement and federal prosecutors.[85] Chicago's political landscape has been firmly under the control of the <delete> for over 85 years and has been widely described as a political machine.[86][87][88][89] In the 1980s, the FBI's Operation Greylord uncovered massive and systemic corruption in Chicago's judicial system. Greylord was the longest and most successful undercover operation in the history of the FBI, and resulted in 92 federal indictments, including 17 judges, 48 lawyers, eight policemen, 10 deputy sheriffs, eight court officials, and one state legislator. Nearly all were convicted on a variety of charges including bribery, kickbacks, fraud, vote buying, racketeering, and drug trafficking.[90][91][92]

The late 1980s and 1990s saw further efforts by the FBI to prosecute Chicago's public crime syndicates. Operation Incubator obtained about a dozen convictions or guilty pleas, including those from five members of the City Council and an aide to former Mayor Harold Washington.[93] Later Operation Gambat brought a wide range of charges against a Chicago judge, a state senator, an alderman, and two others relating to corruption in the Cook County Circuit Court, the Illinois Senate, and the Chicago City Council. Four were convicted and a fifth died during trial.[94] The most extensive operation by the FBI of the 1990s, Operation Silver Shovel, sought to uncover corruption within Chicago labor unions, organized crime, and other city government officials. Operation Silver Shovel resulted in the conviction of 6 Chicago Alderman and a dozen other local officials on a wide range of corruption related charges.[94][95][96]

From 2019 to 2012, 33 Chicago aldermen were convicted on corruption charges, a conviction rate of roughly one third of those elected in the time period. A report from the Office of the Legislative Inspector General noted that over half of Chicago's elected alderman took illegal campaign contributions in 2013.[97] In 2015, mayor appointed Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, was convicted in a $23 million kickback scheme and was sentenced to seven and-a-half years in prison.[98] In addition to the Bennett conviction, a joint investigative report issued by the Office of the Inspector General and federal authorities documented widespread corruption within Chicago Public Schools in 2015. The audit noted the criminal shakedown of a CPS vendor, a records falsification scheme by a principal, numerous instances of employees abusing CPS's tax-exempt status to purchase personal items at big-box retailers, illegally using taxpayer-funded resources to campaign for political causes and stealing from taxpayer-funded accounts intended for purchasing student materials.[99]

A 2015 report released by the University of Illinois at Chicago's political science department declared Chicago the "corruption capital of America", citing that the Chicago-based Federal Judicial District for Northern Illinois reported 45 public corruption convictions for 2013 and a total of 1,642 convictions for the 38 years since 1976 when the U.S. Department of Justice began compiling the statistics. UIC Professor and former Chicago Alderman Dick Simpson noted in the report that "To end corruption, society needs to do more than convict the guys that get caught. A comprehensive anti-corruption strategy must be forged and carried out over at least a decade. A new political culture in which public corruption is no longer tolerated must be created".[100][101]
The FBI's Chicago division.

Examples of other high-profile Chicago political figures convicted on corruption related charges include Rod Blagojevich, Jesse Jackson Jr., Isaac Carothers, Arenda Troutman, Edward Vrdolyak, Otto Kerner, Jr., Constance Howard, Fred Roti and Dan Rostenkowski.

In October 2015, the FBI announced that Michael Anderson would be taking over for a retiring Robert Holley as Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago Bureau. Anderson, a corruption veteran who wrote the FBI Public Corruption Field Guide, called Chicago "target rich" for cases in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. Anderson commands a team of 850 agents in Chicago along with analysts and support staff.[102][103]

Most corruption cases in Chicago are prosecuted by the US Attorney's office, as legal jurisdiction makes most offenses punishable as a federal crime.[104] The current US Attorney for the Northern district of Illinois is Zachary T. Fardon.[105] In a press conference in January 2016, in the wake of the conviction of former Chicago City Hall official, John Bills, for taking $2 million in bribes, Fardon commented "Public corruption [in Chicago] is a disease and where public officials violate the public trust, we have to hold them accountable. And I do believe that by doing so, it sends a deterrent message."[106][107]


Please tell me how where Jesse Smollett fits into that? How is it that a false report is worse than selective prosecution or an arrest developing over false evidence ginned by the police.

Smollett did what he did. No one got hurt over it, it certainly hasn't seemed to help his career a bit. No one was hurt. The case was already in the heand of prosecutors and they declined to prosecute. The CPD just wants to slam dunk Smollett to let him know he can't beat the CPD. Talk about a Trumpian misuse of power.