Remember when Kim Foxx said Smollett’s court file would be unsealed? Turns out it won’t be

Via Guy Benson. Between this, her office’s inexplicable leniency for Smollett, and her strange fake recusal from his case, I’m worried that Kim Foxx’s grip on winning Prosecutor of the Year is starting to slip.

Two days ago she told the media that she thought the court had sealed Smollett’s court file due to a misunderstanding and that it would be unsealed once the error was recognized. Two days later, the story has changed:

The state prosecutors’ association also faulted Cook County prosecutors for not objecting to a defense request to immediately seal the court file at Tuesday’s brief, unannounced hearing. By Tuesday evening, all traces of the case had been deleted from court records.

In an interview Wednesday with the Tribune, Foxx said she believed the case file had only been sealed due to a misunderstanding — and that the seal did not apply to the entire court file. Nevertheless, she said, the case file would be unsealed.

However, on Thursday, an office spokeswoman backed off that claim, saying the case file would remain under seal in its entirety by court order.

The Chicago Tribune ran to court yesterday to try to prevent Smollett’s lawyers from moving to expunge his file, which conceivably would mean all records related to the case getting destroyed. Smollett’s lawyers insisted they won’t try to do that — surely you trust them — and the presiding judge assured the Tribune’s attorneys that records wouldn’t be destroyed even if the file ultimately was expunged. “That isn’t what we do in Cook County,” he said.

So, look out next week for the inevitable headline, “SMOLLETT RECORDS DESTROYED AFTER FILE EXPUNGED; FOXX KNOWS NOTHING.”

Tribune columnist Eric Zorn crows in today’s paper that Foxx is going to lose her job over this and deserves to. Good luck with that, buddy. It’s 2019. To the extent accountability was ever a thing in America, it isn’t anymore.

[A]lthough she can point with some pride to the diversionary programs that have kept small-time offenders out of jail and offered them fresh starts and clean states, her betrayal of the public’s understandable expectations of justice in the Smollett case will taint that entire initiative. Both the National District Attorneys Association and the Illinois Prosecutors Bar Association have released statements this week sharply critical of Foxx.

She will be defending this deeply disappointing outcome from now until at least March 17, 2020. That’s the date of the primary election in which she is now certain to face a Democratic challenger for the office whose ideals she has disgraced.

She won the primary for Cook County state’s attorney in 2016 by 30 points. How many left-wing Chicago voters are going to care about Smollett a year from now, especially if Trump and the right turn Foxx into some national right-wing hate object? She might be reelected purely out of spite. Or because the public approves of how she handled the 50 new Chicago police scandals destined to occur between now and then.

And then, when Dick Durbin retires in a few years, she can cash in that favor she did for Tina Tchen and get herself elected senator with Michelle Obama’s support.

Here’s the lawyer for the Osundairo brothers, commenting last night on CNN about Team Jussie’s exciting new theory that the brothers not only viciously assaulted him but wore whiteface make-up under ski masks to throw him off their scent.

Gloria Schmidt, an attorney who worked with the Osundairo brothers, says she agrees with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel that it’s "an embarrassment" that charges against Jussie Smollett were dropped. https://t.co/JzaUWckW5p pic.twitter.com/FF1QAvGVYc

— CNN (@CNN) March 29, 2019