In Cook County, there is a time-honored tradition that minor traffic offenses – almost always speeding tickets – can be disposed of by going to court and saying “I’d like to stipulate guilt, your honor, and request court supervision in recognition of my otherwise excellent driving record.”

When I was a youngster – shall we say, college through my teens – I occasionally exceeded posted speed limits. Not all the time, of course, and not so wildly to be a danger to the road, but often enough that I got to know Chicago’s “supervision” program rather well.

Should such a crime – the entire Mueller Commission, its advocates and its publicists – be simply swept under the rug and be forgotten?

If the judge grants it (in theory at least, it’s not guaranteed), you pay court costs (in my day, it was about a hundred bucks, the cost of the ticket), and it doesn’t go against your record, as long as you don’t have another ticket for four months.

Yes, I will admit, the lead foot of my youth caused me to take advantage of this program, sometimes, a couple times per year. (I went straight when I got married; I haven’t had a speeding ticket since the early 1990s).

Now, there are a number of reasons for this program, but I always assumed that the key ones are these: while we want every violation of the law to be punished in some way, there’s no need to waste time and resources on something as minor as driving five or ten miles over on the expressway, when the court has more important crimes, like drunk driving, blowing red lights, and other things that are more likely to cause fatalities. Losing a day of work to go to court plus paying $100 court costs is probably punishment enough, without wasting the court’s resources on a trial and putting points against the driver’s record as other violations would more obviously merit.

Whether we agree with this process or not, it’s the way things are in Cook County, and I suspect that while the rest of the country reacted in horror to the announcement that Jussie Smollett’s sixteen felony counts were dropped Tuesday, with only forfeiture of his $10,000 bail as his penalty, the concept of traffic court “supervision” was probably one of the first things to come to mind for us Chicagoans.

The Jussie Smollett Case

Actor Jussie Smollett filed a police report in which he claimed to have been attacked by two thugs outside a Chicago sandwich place in the middle of the night… in fact, on one of the coldest nights in years. Much of America immediately disbelieved the story of a complex hate crime at subzero temperatures at 2:00am, and the story quickly turned from a search for the perpetrators into an investigation of whether he had in fact filed a false crime report.

Eventually, Smollett himself was indicted for 16 felonies, posted $10,000 bail, and became a national punchline, as he claimed that somewhere in Chicago there were anti-black, anti-gay bigots so deluded as to shout “This is MAGA country” in one of the most solidly Democrat cities in the country. Whatever Chicago may be – and it is many things – it’s not MAGA country.

America waited with bated breath to see what would happen.

Chicago’s police had expended considerable effort on an international search (one claim was that the attackers were Nigerian)… the city feared bad public relations as it continually tries to grow its film business (we’ll never rival Hollywood, but every show helps)… and the public was offended, as we pride ourselves in being rather tolerant in these matters. It’s been a hundred years since the Chicago race riots; we’ve elected blacks and gays and women and every other imaginable minority to public office here in the years since. We have our problems – lots of them – but “minority intolerance” isn’t one of them.

Everyone expected Mr. Smollett, if convicted, to be hit with something severe. Surely prison time would be appropriate; the question would be how much.

When Mr. Smollett was essentially given “supervision” by the Cook County prosecutor, even the mayor and police chief went into shock. To them, and to the public too, this said that the prosecutor viewed all these issues as being unworthy of trial, unworthy of substantial punishment.

It could mean that the prosecutor had personal political reasons for it, all her own (rumors of connections abound, and this is Chicago, after all, where everything is political). But could those reasons outrank the reasons that the mayor and the police chief have for wanting a proper prosecution attempted?

If it is true that this was a false report, then the city and its people have taken a huge hit, being branded as inhospitable territory. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of hard dollars spent on the case, it could have cost Chicago tourism, film or series bookings, convention business… each of which could have meant millions of dollars in lost revenue. If it was a false report, such a hoax merits a much more serious punishment than a $10,000 “court costs” forfeiture… and if it was a real report, then there are two dangerous lunatics out there pouring bleach on people at 2:00am, who really need to be found and committed to an asylum.

The decision to prosecute or not to prosecute each crime can indeed be a complex one, and we in the public will never know for sure how strong or weak a case the state had, when it decided not to continue to trial. There are still many unknowns in this case.

But what is known for certain is that future practitioners of “hate crime hoaxes” have gained a great deal by this decision. Despite our knowledge of the damage that “hate crime hoaxes” do to the public – from the Tawana Brawley accusations to the Duke lacrosse team, and so many more over the years – our society is still reluctant to prosecute the false accusers, no matter how much damage these false accusers may do.

The Mueller Commission

We now know that early in the days of the Donald Trump campaign for the presidency – possibly as early as his announcement in 2015 – there were deep state operatives colluding to find a way to sabotage his effort.

Both positive and negative campaigning are of course perfectly legal, but the Hatch Act and other statutes restrict almost everyone in the federal government from most forms of active participation in either kind.

When the Mueller Commission finally released its internal report to the Attorney General in March, 2019, it became a matter of public record what had long been suspected: that top-echelon employees of the FBI had been involved in an effort to defame US citizens and candidates, to provide priceless political contributions to his opposition in the form of an unjustified investigation, and to undermine or otherwise hamstring a sitting president for the full first two years of his term.

Now that the faulty FISA warrants and fabricated data on which the commission was based have all been revealed as unquestionably fraudulent, the government has closed the book on the commission, and technically, that’s that. No further indictments. Case closed.

But is that fair?

The “Russia collusion” narrative was a hoax, nothing more, nothing less. It never had a drop of truth to it. Whether one likes President Trump or his administration or not, there are no two ways around this fact: A hoax was perpetrated on him, on his supporters, and on his administration.

All over the world, reporters and politicians have been repeating the lie for two years that the American president is a Russian agent. As outlandish as such a claim always was, millions and millions of people have believed it.

This affects how foreign governments see America. It affects how American voters have been voting, and will continue to vote.

And – like all hoaxes – even when they are proven to have been frauds all along, some percentage of those who heard the hoax will never hear or absorb the fact that it was disproven. A quarter or a third or more of the American electorate – having heard trusted voices in the press and the government repeat the claim, day in and day out – will always cast their ballots in the future having this lie in their heads, misguiding their judgment in the election booth.

Should such a crime – the entire Mueller Commission, its advocates and its publicists – be simply swept under the rug and be forgotten?

Or is it time to make a stand at last, and proclaim loudly to the world that Truth Matters, and the knowing perpetrators of destructive hoaxes must be held to account, once and for all?

Copyright 2019 John F. Di Leo

John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based actor, writer, Customs broker and trade compliance consultant. His columns are regularly found in Illinois Review.

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