Category: Corruption

The MuellerGate Cover-Up Is Unraveling

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There was never any “Russian collusion” by the Trump campaign, and so why was there a need for a nearly two-year-long special counsel investigation? Because when President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, this caused a panic among “Deep State” operatives who feared the truth about the Obama administration’s surveillance of the Trump campaign would be exposed. Therefore, to conceal this scandal — to protect the people at the Department of Justice and other agencies who had been involved in approving this political surveillance — Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel, to manufacture a narrative of Trump wrongdoing that would distract from what really happened. That’s what it looks like to me, anyway. The Mueller investigation was actually a cover-up, and now that Attorney General William Barr has ordered an investigation of the origins of the “Russian collusion” story, Democrats and their media allies are beginning to panic:

California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff called Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the origins of the Russia probe “un-American” in a Thursday night tweet.
“While Trump stonewalls the public from learning the truth about his obstruction of justice, Trump and Barr conspire to weaponize law enforcement and classified information against their political enemies,” Schiff wrote. “The coverup has entered a new and dangerous phase. This is un-American.”
President Donald Trump on Thursday directed the heads of the CIA, FBI, State Department and other agencies to cooperate with Barr as he investigates the origins of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
The president also released a memo authorizing the attorney general to “declassify, downgrade, or direct the declassification or downgrading of information or intelligence” regarding the investigation into whether or not the Trump campaign was surveilled unlawfully.

Schiff’s claims are a bizarre inversion of reality. How is it a “coverup” to declassify documents? Wouldn’t a “coverup” seek to conceal secrets, rather than to disclose them? And who was it that “weaponize[d] law enforcement . . . against their political enemies”? Isn’t that exactly what the Obama administration did to the Trump campaign?

Meanwhile, Ace of Spades calls attention to the case of Svetlana Lokhova, a Russian academic who is suing FBI intelligence asset Stefan Halper and several media organizations who published stories based on Halper’s claim that Lokhova was a spy. She says Halper deliberately arranged to have Lokhova seated next to Gen. Michael Flynn (at the time, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency) during dinners at England’s Cambridge University. Halper then allegedly reported the Lokhova-Flynn meetings as evidence that Flynn was “compromised.”

This manufactured evidence subsequently became part of the “Russian collusion” narrative, and was reported by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NBC — all of whom are named as defendants in Lokhova’s lawsuit. So you see that there was a circularity of influence (between the intelligence community, Democrat politicians and the news media) involved in creating this narrative and selling it to the public, in order to sustain political support for the Mueller probe which, as I say, was intended to conceal the truth about all this.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Americans are going to learn how they have been deceived. Even Democrat voters who despise Trump will no longer be able to ignore how the Obama administration misused U.S. intelligence as part of an effort to help elect Hillary Clinton. CNN’s ratings are already in the toilet. How many people will still be watching CNN after it becomes evident — as it soon will — that the network was complicit in this dishonest propaganda operation?



 

What Mueller Did With Our Money

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My podcasting partner John Hoge calls attention to this summary of the Mueller investigation by Victor Davis Hanson:

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year, $30 million, 448-page report did not find collusion between Donald Trump and Russia.
Despite compiling private allegations of loud and obnoxious Trump behavior, Mueller also concluded that there was not any actionable case of obstruction of justice by the president. . . .
Yet Mueller’s team went down every blind alley relating to its investigation — except where Obama-era officials were likely culpable for relevant unethical or illegal behavior. . . .
The problem with the Muller investigation, and with former intelligence officials such as Brennan, Clapper, Comey and McCabe, is pious hypocrisy. Those who have lectured America on Trump’s unproven crimes have written books and appeared on TV to publicize their own superior virtue. Yet they themselves have engaged in all sorts of unethical and illegal behavior.

Without regard to Mueller’s failure to find any evidence of the fictitious “Russian collusion,” Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) are acting as if obstruction of justice is a proven fact, raising the question of how an innocent man’s effort to prove his innocence can obstruct justice. If you’re not a witch, and yet you’ve become the target of a witch-hunt, is it wrong to try to stop the witch-hunt? You’re never going to see anyone make that point on CNN, but then again, unless you’re stuck in airport, you’ll probably never see CNN at all.

 

The Belated Admission of Media Error

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One of the things about media malpractice is, you may not notice it until the media begin reporting on a subject with which you are directly familiar. Like, have you ever seen a Nick Saban press conference? He obviously hates the media, because nobody knows Alabama football better than the coach, and their “spin” annoys him. If media bias is a problem in sports coverage — and you can ask Coach Nick about it — how much more of a problem is it in political journalism?

Another thing about media malpractice is that, by the time they admit they got the story wrong, the correction gets less coverage than their original error, and sometimes people’s lives can be wrecked by a published falsehood long before the media says, “Oops.”

Consider the case of President Trump and “Russian collusion.” Professor Glenn Reynolds reminds us that this entire narrative started with Hillary Clinton’s campaign team — specifically Robbie Mook and John Podesta — deciding immediately after her 2016 defeat “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up . . . Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.” The hacking of Democrat emails was actually a crime for which Robert Mueller has indicted Russian military intelligence officers but (a) those emails didn’t make a decisive impact on the 2016 campaign and (b) Trump was not responsible for it. However, the media’s amplification and repetition of this simple message — “Russia stole the election” — eventually inspired the (completely unsubstantiated) suggestion that the reason Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017 was to prevent Comey from uncovering “collusion” between Russia and the Trump campaign, a suggestion that in turn led to the appointment of Mueller as special counsel. And it took nearly two years for Mueller to admit what Trump has said all along — there was no “collusion” at all. However, the media outlets that promoted the Clinton campaign’s phony Russia-stole-the-election message are now trying to spin this revelation in such a way as to conceal their role in a damaging political propaganda campaign against the President.

Now that Mueller has finished his investigation and filed his report, the New York Times is finally admitting what every Fox News viewer has known for more than a year: The Steele dossier, commissioned by the Clinton campaign and used to justify federal surveillance of the Trump campaign, was a pack of lies based on dubious Russian sources:

[T]he most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove. Mr. Mueller’s report contained over a dozen passing references to the document’s claims but no overall assessment of why so much did not check out. . . .
How the dossier ended up loaded with dubious or exaggerated details remains uncertain, but the document may be the result of a high-stakes game of telephone, in which rumors and hearsay were passed from source to source.
Another possibility — one that Mr. Steele has not ruled out — could be Russian disinformation. That would mean that in addition to carrying out an effective attack on the Clinton campaign, Russian spymasters hedged their bets and placed a few land mines under Mr. Trump’s presidency as well.

Oh, isn’t that convenient? Now that the Trump presidency has spent 22 months under the shadow of Mueller’s investigation, and after many of the president’s associates have been prosecuted on various grounds having nothing to do with Russia, the New York Times decides it’s OK to admit that the Steele dossier — the original pretext of this whole “Russian collusion” hoax — was a pile of bogus smears, possibly including disinformation from the Kremlin! This might be news to the Times readership, even though the truth about the Steele dossier been reported five nights a week, month after month, on Sean Hannity’s show.

Since I’m playing ombudsman here, allow me to enumerate the possible reasons for suspicion of “Russian collusion”:

  1. Trump’s business ties to Russia — Trump’s real-estate empire is heavily leveraged, and some of his debt is owed (mostly via German banks) to Russian investors.
  2. Trump’s “nationalism” — In contrast to the D.C. political elite in both parties, Trump is skeptical of the “globalization” consensus that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War. Trump isn’t inclined to defer to the Brussels-based European Union leadership, and seems to believe our NATO allies are not as friendly as they should be. Trump’s skepticism toward the EU and the whole “globalization” narrative makes him more sympathetic to the argument that Russia is suffering unfairly from Europe’s anti-Russian policies left over from the Cold War.
  3. Roger Stone’s fingerprints on the Wikileaks release of Democrat emails — According to Mueller’s indictment, the hacker “Guccifer 2.0” was an operative of Russian military intelligence. Stone, a notorious practitioner of political dirty tricks, was deeply interested in this, and reportedly had advance knowledge of Wikileaks obtaining the hacked emails.
  4. The Trump Tower meeting — In June 2016, “three senior members of the 2016 Trump campaign – Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort — [met with] at least five other people, including Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya,” who had promised to provide “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. However, there is evidence to suggest that this was a Clinton campaign dirty trick orchestrated by Fusion GPS, using Veselnitskaya as bait to compromise the Trump campaign.

All of this can be admitted as giving credence to suspicion that there was something going on between Trump and the Russians, but suspicion is not proof, and all of this can be defended or explained as innocent. What happened instead was that a lot of the media (especially including CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times) let themselves become a conduit for the Clinton campaign’s post-election “spin” operation, depicting Trump’s presidency as illegitimate and corrupt because the election had been wrongly “stolen” with Russian assistance.

Why did the New York Times wait this long to admit that the Steele dossier was a tainted source? Because to have examined this subject earlier would have undermined Team Clinton’s narrative, which was the underlying pretext of the Mueller investigation. Now that Trump has officially been cleared of “collusion,” it is OK for the media to admit the Steele dossier was a pile of garbage, because it has already served its purpose, i.e., to damage Trump by justifying the investigation.

You see, however, that this admission by the New York Times is too late to undo the harm inflicted by the months of their dishonest reporting which ignored or downplayed the problems with the “Russian collusion” narrative. It’s sort of like the way the New York Times was happy to collect a Pulitzer for Walter Duranty’s dishonest reporting about Stalin’s Soviet regime, and then wait decades before admitting Duranty got it wrong. As long as the Soviet Union was an ongoing enterprise, the New York Times couldn’t admit the truth about how they had published Stalinist propaganda as “journalism,” but once the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended: “Oops.” That they were so wrong, for so long, about some of the greatest atrocities in human history — the terror-famine in Ukraine, and Stalin’s bloody purges — ought to have forever destroyed the credibility of the New York Times, but some people keep believing them anyway. Because some people are idiots.



 

Trump Trolls His Media Enemies

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Today, while liberal pundits were going wall-to-wall on the cable-news panels denouncing Trump as an obstructor of justice, our Commander-in-Chief flew to Florida and played golf with Rush Limbaugh. That’s a brilliant move. Nothing enrages liberals more than to see conservatives having fun, which is why I try to be ostentatiously happy. Thursday morning, I made a point of saying I didn’t really care about the Mueller report, since I’d long ago concluded that the whole thing was a sham.

Nevertheless, some commentary seemed necessary:

For approximately 3 million people, nothing in the Mueller report could exonerate President Trump of “Russian collusion,” obstruction of justice, and various other high crimes and misdemeanors of which they are certain he is guilty. For those 3 million people (a number reflecting the combined average weekday primetime audience of CNN and MSNBC) Trump’s guilt is an indisputable fact, his presidency an ongoing crime against humanity, his 2016 election a fraud. In a nation of 325 million people, of course, 3 million is less than a single percentage point. However, that hard-core audience of obsessive Trump-haters includes every Democrat in Washington and the vast majority of our nation’s journalists, university faculty, and other such members of the intelligentsia. Therefore, their deranged idée fixe has enormous influence, calling into existence a sort of anti-Trump industry that manufactures a constant output of rage-inducing propaganda. The CNN/MSNBC bubble is the cable-TV equivalent of a cult compound, where dissent from their political religion is forbidden. For the past two years, the fanatics have been told every night by Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, et al., that the final destruction of Trump was at hand — “the walls are closing in!” — and the left-wing faithful awaited their deliverance from the evil man in the White House.
“Orange Man Bad” — that’s a shorthand label for the anti-Trump mentality, coined by an anonymous contributor on a Reddit forum in 2017, mocking the robotic mindlessness of the president’s enemies. No fact that might contradict their Trump-hating beliefs has any validity to them, because Orange Man Bad. By obverse principle, anything done to harm Trump or his supporters, including libel and violent assault, is considered legitimate, because Orange Man Bad. Living inside a media-generated echo chamber where everyone shares their simplistic worldview, the Trump-haters tune in nightly to their MSNBC/CNN religious revival and are catechized, so to speak, with the latest reiteration of the Orange Man Bad gospel. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.



 

Mueller? Mueller? Mueller?

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Washington, D.C., is going insane in anticipation of today’s release of the Mueller report, but honestly, I find it difficult to care. More than a year ago, I came to the conclusion that Robert Mueller’s “investigation” was actually a cover-up, intended to conceal or distract attention from the real scandal, i.e., that the Obama administration had authorized intelligence agencies to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign. We cannot expect Mueller to actually admit this in his report, of course, and so whatever’s in this 400-page document, it won’t be an admission of the truth — that Mueller was appointed after Trump fired FBI director James Comey because people in the intelligence community were afraid Trump would discover and reveal the extent of illegal and/or corrupt activity by the Justice Department, the CIA, etc. Meanwhile . . .

 

BATTLE OVER EDITS!
 

WASH POST: Mueller decided he could NOT come to conclusion on obstruction, was difficult to determine President’s intent… MORE 

Redacted report ready for consumption…

Ken Starr Fears Anti-Trump Screed… 

Dems, Republicans poised to pounce… 

IT’S NOT OVER: Pelosi, Schumer call on Mueller to testify…

Those are the top headlines at the Drudge Report this morning, and we will await a 9:30 a.m. press conference by Attorney General Bill Barr, which has enraged Democrats like Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who says Barr is trying to put a pro-Trump “spin” on the Mueller report. And . . .?

Like, how dare a Republican engage in “spin”? Only Democrats are allowed to “spin” the news! It’s all so incredibly absurd . . .



 

The Collusion Delusion Boomerang

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Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have still not recovered from Attorney General William Barr’s testimony Wednesday that he believes “spying did occur” in 2016, and that he intends to investigate the Obama administration’s surveillance of the Trump campaign. That word “spying” seemed to have a traumatic effect on Democrats, and their media allies immediately began to spin this as Barr promoting a “conspiracy theory,” even though it is just a plain statement of known facts: Yes, the FBI targeted Trump campaign officials for surveillance, based on the Steele dossier commissioned by the Clinton campaign.

Last May, after it was revealed that the FBI had used an informant, Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, to spy on Trump campaign aides Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, I wrote this:

Here’s the thing: FBI officials didn’t expect Hillary to lose. As we know, text messages between two high-ranking FBI officials discussed an “insurance policy” to prevent Trump from becoming president. Because they expected Hillary to win, they also expected to be able to prevent this taxpayer-funded espionage from becoming public knowledge.
And then Trump won.
Democrat operatives — in the Clinton campaign, in the Obama administration, in the federal bureaucracy, and in the media — panicked at the thought of what the newly-elected president might do (e.g., expose the corruption at the Justice Department) used information from the Steele dossier as a pretext for the Mueller “investigation.” Yet there was never any actual “Russian collusion” to investigate, and the purpose of appointing a special counsel was . . . what? To create a phony “scandal”? To undermine the legitimacy of the new administration? To cover up wrongdoing by the Obama administration and the FBI?

The Mueller investigation was part of a cover-up, intended to prevent the public from becoming aware of the (potentially criminal) domestic espionage operation against the Trump campaign. So now, after two years, Mueller has concluded his phony investigation without producing evidence of the (non-existent) “collusion,” and there’s a new attorney general with no conflicts of interest to prevent him from investigating exactly what kind of shenanigans went on at the DOJ during the Obama years. Can you understand why Democrats are freaking out?

Patricia McCarthy writes:

When A.G. Barr stated he would be investigating the “spying” on the Trump campaign, the Democrats on the committee were shocked, truly stunned. How dare he suggest such a thing? These folks, for over two years, have had their heads deep in ostrich sand. They are apparently completely unaware, or pretend to be, of the massive amounts of actual proof that the Obama administration illegally attempted to eliminate Trump from the running by trying to plant its own spies in the campaign and surveil under prohibited pretexts. Part of this plan was to create and amass fake evidence to be used against him. As almost everyone knows by now, the “Russia Collusion” hoax was just that, a hoax, devised by persons with power in the FBI, the DOJ, the NSA and the Obama administration. Once Hillary lost the election, her minions, such as the disreputable Rob Mook, were right there to get the claim out that she lost because “the Russians hacked the election.” Yeah, right. No way. Not a chance. Did she know then that her supporters in the Obama administration, the FBI, and the DOJ had already implemented a stratagem to undo his victory? Probably. That would explain her leap to blame her loss on “the Russians.”

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) The most common-sense interpretation of what we know is that the spying on the Trump campaign was conducted with the approval of then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and, at least, the tacit approval of President Obama himself. So all the media and congressional Democrats who have spent the past two years hyping up the phony “Russian collusion” narrative will now find their demands for a thorough investigation come boomeranging back at them.



 

‘Henry Greenberg’ and the Deep State Conspiracy Against Donald Trump

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Michael Caputo, a longtime Trump associate whose life was wrecked by the Mueller investigation, called attention to an important fact this morning in an appearance on the Fox News Channel:

Caputo said that a man identifying himself as a Russian-American named “Henry Greenberg” called him one day from Miami, “offering information [on Hillary Clinton] to the Trump campaign.”
“I deflected the call to Roger Stone,” Caputo recalled, noting that at the time he knew Greenberg to be a convicted criminal with questionable ties.
Caputo said he found out that Greenberg is or was an FBI informant, and claimed his real identity is a Gennady Vasilievich Vostretsov, a Russian national with a violent criminal history.
One of Stone’s attorneys, Grant Smith, claimed in a 2018 letter to the House Intelligence Committee that Greenberg a.k.a. Vostretsov was trying to “entrap” Stone and “compromise the Trump effort.”

This has been public knowledge since last June:

Caputo said in a letter he sent to the House Intelligence Committee on [June 15] that the man, 59-year-old Gennadiy Vasilievich Vostretsov, had reached out to him in late May 2016 through his business partner in Miami, a Russian national named Sergey Petrushin. Vostretsov introduced himself as “Henry Greenberg” and said he had information about Clinton he wanted to provide the Trump campaign.
Caputo put him in touch with Roger Stone, who was serving as a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump and lived in South Florida. Stone met with “Greenberg” but later told Caputo that he had tried to sell information on Clinton, but he declined and thought “Greenberg” was “a nut,” according to the letter.
According to text messages reviewed by the Washington Post, Caputo wrote to Stone: “How crazy is the Russian?” Stone replied that “Greenberg” wanted “big” money. “Waste of time,” he texted Caputo.
Caputo said he forgot about this interaction until several weeks ago, when the Special Counsel asked him about a May 29, 2016, text message he sent to Stone asking if “Greenberg” had contacted him. Caputo said he was suspicious about how much the Special Counsel knew about the “Greenberg” approach and ordered his own investigation of him.
“After my [Office of Special Counsel] interview, I deployed the crowdfunding resources of CaputoLegalFund.com to investigate Henry Greenberg in the United States and Russia,” Caputo said in a statement on Sunday. “We discovered very quickly that this shady character has a long career as an FBI informant.”
Caputo found that “Greenberg” was really Vostretsov and had also assumed the names Henry Oknyansky and Gennady Arzhanik. He learned that Vostretsov had a long history of criminal activity in Russia, served ten years in prison, he first arrived in the U.S. in 1994, was soon after charged with assault with a deadly weapon, and served time in U.S. prisons for that and other charges.

Ask yourself a couple of questions:

  1. Was it a coincidence that an FBI informant contacted Caputo in May 2016 offering to sell information on Clinton?
  2. Why did Mueller’s investigators know to ask questions about this guy?

Isn’t it obvious — aren’t we justified in surmising — that Vostretsov was part of an effort by the FBI to lure Trump’s associates into a trap? And if we are correct in this logical inference, isn’t it therefore apparent that federal agents were targeting the Trump campaign even before the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation was officially begun in late July 2016? This is the clearest clue we have that the so-called “Deep State” conspiracy against Trump had begun operating months before the date claimed by ex-FBI director James Comey. Whether or not Comey knew what was going on with Vostretsov, if Caputo’s version of the story is correct, it seems highly unlikely that a known FBI informant would have been independently trying to contact the Trump campaign.

Especially we should consider this bit of information important in light of the fact that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the central figure in the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, was evidently in cahoots with Fusion GPS, the Clinton-connected firm which commissioned the Steele dossier. Is it possible that the same people who were pushing Veselnitskaya toward the Trump campaign were also involved in the earlier “Greenberg” ruse? And doesn’t this suggest that someone inside the FBI may have been working with Fusion GPS personnel or other Clinton operatives to do a “sting” on the Trump campaign? Well, I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I hope Senate Republicans will start trying to connect these dots, because this thing reeks to high heaven.



 

Texts Show Michelle Obama Aide Intervened in Jussie Smollett Case

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Former Obama aide Tina Tchen (left); Cook County prosecutor Kim Foxx (right).

The stench of corruption in Chicago surrounding the Jussie Smollett fake “hate crime” case has enraged the police chief, the mayor and everybody else with a sense of justice and propriety. Suspicions have focused on Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who exchanged text messages with former Michelle Obama chief of staff Tina Tchen shortly after Smollett perpetrated his clumsy hoax:

Just days after Jussie Smollett told Chicago police he had fought off a pair of attackers who targeted him in an apparent hate crime, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx tried to persuade Police Supt. Eddie Johnson to turn the investigation over to the FBI.
Foxx’s call to Johnson came after an influential supporter of the “Empire” actor reached out to Foxx personally: Tina Tchen, a Chicago attorney and former chief of staff for former First Lady Michelle Obama, according to emails and text messages provided by Foxx to the Chicago Sun-Times in response to a public records request.
Tchen passed Foxx’s number to a relative of the actor, and the ensuing conversations with the family member were cited by Foxx last month as the reason she recused herself from Smollett’s prosecution . . .
Text messages show Tchen contacted Foxx on Feb. 1, three days after Smollett said he was jumped by two men as he walked home from a sandwich shop near his Streeterville home. Tchen texted Foxx to set up an early morning phone call.
“I wanted to give you a call on behalf of Jussie Smollett and family who I know. They have concerns about the investigation,” Tchen wrote in a text sent before 5 a.m., seeking to set up a call with Foxx before Tchen left on an 8 a.m. flight to New York.
A few hours later, Foxx received a text from a relative of Smollett, who said she’d received the number from Tchen.
In an interview with the Sun-Times this week, Foxx said that the family member expressed concerns about leaked information about the investigation — information that media outlets attributed to “police sources.”
“They had no doubt about the quality of the investigation, but believed that the FBI would have a tighter lid on the information,” said Foxx, adding that Johnson initially seemed receptive to the idea of turning the case over to the FBI.

People are angry about this gross miscarriage of justice:

 

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his city’s police force Tuesday afternoon, denouncing prosecutors for dropping charges against “Empire” star Jussie Smollett and slamming the episode as a “whitewash of justice.”
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and Emanuel said they were not only furious with the outcome of Tuesday’s surprise hearing but also blindsided by the decision itself, with the officials only learning Smollett wouldn’t face charges for allegedly faking a hate crime at the same time the public found out.
“Where is the accountability in the system? You cannot have – because of a person’s position – one set of rules applies to them and another set of rules apply to everyone else,” Emanuel said. “Our officers did hard work day in and day out, countless hours working to unwind what actually happened that night. The city saw its reputation dragged through the mud…It’s not just the officers’ work, but the work of the grand jury that made a decision based on only a sliver of the evidence [presented]. Because of the judge’s decision, none of that evidence will ever be made public.” . . .
Emanuel also said: “[This case] sends a clear message that if you’re in a position of influence and power you’ll be treated one way and if you’re not you’ll be treated another way.”
Johnson blasted the prosecution for not consulting with cops and hinted the episode could further strain the relationship between the department and prosecutors.
“I don’t know what’s unusual for the state’s attorney but we found out about when you all did,” Johnson said. “Prosecutors have their discretion of course, we still have to work with the state’s attorneys office — We’ll have conversations after this.”
But Johnson made sure to add, unequivocally: “At the end of the day it was Smollett who committed this hoax.”

Let’s not mince words, eh? Somebody got bought off here, and there needs to be a FBI investigation of the corruption in Cook County, starting with Kim Foxx. Furthermore, federal prosecutors need to pursue charges against Smollett for the hoax “white powder” letters:

Although the state-level criminal charges were reportedly dropped against actor Jussie Smollett, it remains unclear whether the federal government is still investigating whether he was involved in sending a death threat to himself at “Empire’s” Chicago studio.
Before Smollett claimed two men attacked him with a chemical substance, the studio received a letter addressed to the actor containing a white powder, which turned out to be aspirin. A lawyer and a former police superintendent said the mailing the letter could be considered a terroristic hoax under federal law.
The letter used similar language to the supposed physical attack. Its return address said “MAGA,” and it said “You will die black fag” using letters cut out of magazines.
When Smollett’s alleged accomplices in faking the assault were arrested, police took a magazine and a book of stamps from their home.
A source told CBS2 that the letter was at the root of the better-publicized physical attack, saying “When the letter didn’t get enough attention, he concocted the staged attack.”
Two federal officials told ABC News in February that the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service were investigating whether he was involved in sending the letter. One said the letter was being analyzed in the FBI’s crime lab.
A lawyer told CWB Chicago: “If they have Smollett on the letter, he’ll be facing ‘terroristic hoax’ charges, a felony. There may be federal obstruction charges as well. If they want to bury him, they can.”
CWB also reported that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service was working with the FBI on the mail case and quoted a police officer saying that criminal investigators with the postal unit can be aggressive and deploys sophisticated techniques. “Those postal guys are the real deal,” he said. “They can do amazing things and aren’t afraid of the work.”

My hunch is that Attorney General William Barr’s going to be under pressure from You Know Who to make something happen in Chicago.