Tuesday at a press conference, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel strongly criticized “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett in connection to filing a false police report about an alleged hate crime.

On prosecutors the dropping charges, Emanuel said, “This is a whitewash of justice. A grand jury could not have been clearer — to the cost, $10,000 doesn’t come close financially, but all the other repercussions of this decision made to me, where is the accountability in the system?”

He continued, “Mr. Smollett is still saying that he is innocent, still running down the Chicago police department. How dare him? How dare him? After everybody saw––and I want to remind you, this is not the superintendent’s word against his. The grand jury, a sliver of the evidence, and they came to a conclusion as did the state attorney’s office. This is not the superintendent and the detectives’ department word against his. And even after this whitewash, there is still no sense of ownership of what he’s done. He says that, in fact, he is the wronged in this case. This is an unbelievable not just whitewash of justice. This is a person now who has not been let off scot-free with no sense of accountability of the moral and ethical wrong of his actions from top to bottom. I cannot stress enough that in a time when you have people bringing a moral equivalency in Virginia between bigots and those fighting bigotry, when you have a person using hate crime laws that are on the books to protect people who are minorities from violence, to then turn around and use those laws to advance your career and your financial reward, is there no decency in this man?”

He added, “He’s the person that brought this forward. I remind you all. It goes back to also a letter. He brought this case forward. He said he was the victim of a hate crime, both for his sexual orientation and for being black. The evidence came forward, a grand jury saw the evidence, realized this was a hoax, a hoax on the city, a hoax on hate crimes, a hoax on people of good values who actually were empathetic at first, and he used that empathy for only one reason.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN