Via the Free Beacon. I’m not going to blindly vouch for any police force, especially this one, especially when they may have already jumped the gun on one piece of evidence in this case.

But the suggestion at the beginning of this clip that Chicago cops moved quickly to declare the alleged attack on Smollett racist and homophobic because they had ulterior motives beggars belief. Zach Stafford’s theory is that police rushed to do that because they suspected a hoax from the beginning and wanted to maximize the sense of betrayal when the truth eventually came out. Normally they’re more cautious in hate-crime cases, he claims. Is … this what he’s referring to, though? Because all this does is relay what Smollett told them happened:

Chicago Police Department just sent out this statement re:
Jussie Smollett pic.twitter.com/DxQswZn8xd

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) January 29, 2019

That’s an accurate reflection of what Smollett says happened. “They called me a f—-, they called me a n—-,” he later told ABC. What were the cops supposed to say?

If Stafford’s right that Chicago PD was suspiciously more credulous about this attack early on than they normally are, there’s an obvious reason that has nothing to do with wanting to set him up for a big fall later: He’s a celebrity. There was a thousand times more public attention to this “assault” than there’d be to a hate crime committed against an average person. Chicago cops probably strained to amplify Smollett’s account not because they had some devious plan to maximize the drama before revealing his fraud but because they knew that the media and progressive activists like Stafford were watching them like hawks to make sure they treated the case with the gravity it deserved. If they had betrayed any early skepticism of Smollett’s story, however well-founded, they would have been torched. So instead they took it at face value and threw a ton of resources into finding his attackers, and … they’re getting torched here anyway.

Anything’s possible in terms of police incompetence. It is within the realm of foreseeable outcomes to this sh*tshow that Chicago police screwed up the whole case and Smollett is in fact the innocent victim he claims to be. But knowing that they’re under a woke microscope, with newspapers and Hollywood scrutinizing their every move, I’m guessing police were extra careful in making sure their case against Smollett is airtight. The alternative, that they rushed to accuse a real victim of a hoax, would haunt the department for decades. Exit question: It’s not like any other celebrity defendant has ever walked free amid a media feeding frenzy despite seeming guilty as sin due to shoddy work by the police and D.A., right?

Via Fox News: Watch as an MSNBC guest suggests the Chicago police are framing Jussie Smollett, and Kasie Hunt moves on as if that’s totally normal pic.twitter.com/yazJgYH8q1

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 22, 2019