Fired Top Cop Deserves Jussie Smollett Treatment, Send Him A Bill

CHICAGO — Maybe it’s time for City Hall to call off former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s pound-of-flesh lawsuit against disgraced “Empire” actor and accused hate-crime faker Jussie Smollett.

What started as an allegedly righteous effort to force Smollett to repay the more than $130,000 it cost the city to investigate the actor’s bogus claim white guys in MAGA hats put a rope around his neck, called him racial slurs and beat him up as the polar vortex rolled into town last year, has unfortunately devolved into another City Hall law department attempt to cover for a lying cop.

Former police Supt. Eddie Johnson, that is.

Johnson, you’ll remember, made a big stink about how Smollett’s lies tarnished Chicago’s reputation.

“The accusations within this phony attack received national attention for weeks,” Johnson said back then. “Celebrities, news commentators and even presidential candidates weighed in on something that was choreographed by an actor.”

What a difference a year makes.

Last week, Smollett’s lawyers filed subpoenas for documents that might prove to a federal jury former police Supt. Johnson has a credibility problem, and suggests the city has a different set of accountability standards for cops and civilians.

A former top prosecutor told me the subpoena was a legal “Hail Mary” — nothing short of a publicity stunt —to further embarrass Johnson about the Smollett-like phoniness that got the top cop fired for lying to Mayor Lori Lightfoot about the night beat cops caught him passed out behind the wheel of his police vehicle after a night of drinking and kissing with a woman who wasn’t his wife.

But the whole Johnson affair (and the alleged police cover-up) was more than that. Like Smollett’s fake hate crime, the scandal that got Johnson fired damaged the reputation of a police department struggling to overcome a legacy of corruption.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Supt. Johnson, Chicago’s face of alleged police reform, lied to her face in attempt to cover up his misconduct. And there’s an ongoing investigation into whether the “Thin Blue Line” code of silence that still exists in the department spun into action to keep the truth secret at least until Johnson could retire with a full pension.

The former prosecutor said there’s not much hope that Johnson’s troubles will interfere with the city’s civil case against Smollett. City lawyers will move to squash the subpoena and likely win. Even if Smollett’s attorneys get documentation of Johnson’s lies from the city inspector general, he said, the city will likely win motions to keep a jury from hearing the details.

In this case, though, winning doesn’t seem so important.

Chicago’s law department has a long history of fighting to keep details about the lies cops have told — violations of Rule 14, a rule in the Chicago police disciplinary code that addresses officers who “make false reports, written or oral” — from being revealed in court rooms and to the public.

Violating Rule 14 is supposed to be a cop career killer. “You lie, you die,” is supposedly the word. But that hasn’t been the case in Chicago. Officers found guilty of lying rarely get fired.

Ultimately, officers with serious credibility problems return to the street — and potentially worse, back on the witness stand in felony criminal trials — after they serve out suspensions.

The Smollett civil action is different from a criminal case, of course.

But city lawyers have already filed court papers to stop proof of Johnson’s lies from getting in the hands of Smollett’s lawyers in ways that seem all too familiar to legacy legal tactics used to keep the truth about cops who lie from tainting testimony against folks accused of felonies.

It raises a couple interesting questions: What’s more important: Sticking a washed-up actor with a $130,000 tab for a police investigation or protecting a lying top cop from further embarrassment?

Can the public trust City Hall to treat police officers and regular folks — even unsympathetic characters like Smollett — fairly and equally based on the truth?

That’s not to say that only fair thing for City Hall to do is drop the civil case against Smollett, who filed a counter claim against the city and Johnson for malicious prosecution.

Smollett’s attorneys seem to accidentally suggest another option in court papers.

Their subpoena asks the city inspector general to provide, “Any and all documents that demonstrate the costs incurred by the City of Chicago in the Investigation(s) regarding Eddie Johnson and any steps by the City of Chicago to recover those costs.”

That got me thinking. To be fair to Smollett, City Hall should send Johnson a bill for the taxpayer-funded probe of his boozy drive home and the cover up to keep the details secret.

That's one way to let everybody know there’s a price to be paid for damaging Chicago’s reputation — lying cops, included.