Hate hoaxers are not generally an upstanding bunch, but even among them, Jussie Smollett stands out as particularly craven, dishonest, self-serving, and worse. Now, even after being tried and convicted for faking a hate crime and held up to international ridicule for his clumsy attempt to jump-start his failing acting career by gaining the Left’s coveted victimhood status, Smollett hasn’t given up. Slay reported Saturday that “disgraced Hollywood actor Jussie Smollett is demanding a retrial after being convicted of staging an anti-Trump ‘hate crime’ hoax.” On what grounds? I bet you can guess.
Smollett’s hoax, which involved his claim that MAGA hat-wearing chanting “This is MAGA country” — in Chicago! — jumped him and put a noose around his neck, was designed to smear a large segment of Americans as violent, bigoted racists. The establishment media, eager as ever to promote hatred and division, as well as to smear Trump, eagerly played along and made him a hero, with even Old Joe Biden and Kamala Harris chiming in on his side. While all that was happening, and even throughout his trial and conviction for faking a hate crime, Smollett displayed his acting chops: he never broke character for a moment and always gave the impression that he actually believed his own nonsensical claims.
Apparently, he still believes it all, even long after it has come to light that he paid two Nigerian brothers to fake the hate crime against him. Smollett’s lawyers, according to Slay, “filed court documents seeking a retrial in his conviction for orchestrating the fake hate crime attack that blamed supporters of President Donald Trump.” They’re claiming that the judge at Smollett’s trial, James Linn, was biased against not only Smollett himself but against his legal team as well. They’re claiming that Linn, who is white, “sandbagged their work during cross-examination, and let prosecutors strike a disproportionate amount of potential black jurors and a gay juror.” The hoaxer’s lawyers weren’t satisfied with implying that Linn is a racist, and are also claiming that Linn adopted “a personal retributive tone, based on speculative information.”
Nor is even that all. Smollett’s lawyers are claiming that the whole investigation of his fake hate crime claims was stacked against him from the start. They assert that Judge Michael Toomin, who appointed U.S. Attorney Dan K. Webb as a special prosecutor to look into Smollett’s hoax after all initial charges against the hatemonger had been dropped, was also prejudiced against poor Jussie.
“From the very start of the circuit court’s order granting the appointment of a special prosecutor,” the lawyers’ new court filing claims, “Judge Toomin explicitly, unequivocally, and improperly set forth an opinion that Mr. Smollett was, in fact, guilty of charges which a) Mr. Smollett specifically pled not guilty to, and b) which, at the time of the appointment, had been duly dismissed.” Well, yeah, it was because that dismissal was so suspicious that the new inquiries had to be made in the first place.
Just as brazenly as Smollett himself when he claimed that he had been the victim of this race-hate attack in the first place, Smollett’s lawyers claim that the actor’s “Constitutional rights to due process and to a fair trial were denied by prosecutorial misconduct including allegations that a defense witness was pressured to change his statement” and more.
Related: Jussie Smollett Hits New Low, Releases Painful Rap Song About His Innocence
The likelihood that this gambit will fail is, oh, about 100%. The evidence that he faked the hate crime against himself is just too strong. But Leftists have done this before. Beginning in the 1950s and continuing into the 1970s and 1980s, numerous prominent Leftists insisted that Alger Hiss, a Soviet spy who had worked at high levels in the State Department, was not guilty. Even after Hiss was convicted of perjury in connection with his claim not to have been a Communist spy, he continued to be a darling of the Left and one of Leftists’ favored examples of the alleged “witch hunts” that were conducted against accused Communists at the time. The Left couldn’t admit that Hiss was guilty because to do so would have validated a central claim of their opponents, that Communists had indeed infiltrated the U.S. government.
In the same way, even if they don’t continue to insist that Smollett is innocent, Smollett and his Leftist friends are likely never to admit that he is guilty. To do so would involve acknowledging that their claims of rampant racism among Trump supporters and Americans in general are false and based on lies and hoaxes. That will never happen.
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