A New Day Dawns as Chicago’s Soros Prosecutor Exits Stage Left
It’s clean-up time in Chicago with the end of Kim Foxx’s sinister reign as top prosecutor
Time to break out the disinfectant in Chicago with the end of Kim Foxx’s eight-year run as Illinois State Attorney for Cook County.
As the top work horse in George Soros’ stable of criminals-over-victims prosecutors, Foxx made headlines nationally for her shocking decision to drop the charges in 2019 against actor Jussie Smollett, who staged a hate crime hoax. More absurd and much uglier—her handiwork implementing Soros’ plan to undermine justice itself in the name of racial “equity.”
The first line of defense in maintaining a civil society requires protecting the innocent from thugs, and maintaining law and order. Over her eight years in power, Foxx exonerated hundreds of convicted murderers based on spurious claims that cops beat innocent people of color into confessions, and conspired with prosecutors to ensure convictions by framing the suspects and coercing witnesses. The foul wake of her actions ruined the good names of dozens of police officers and former prosecutors. The families of victims of violent crimes once again had to suffer through the anguish of their losses.
With her allies in the trial bar—who stand to gain multi-million-dollar settlements through wrongful conviction suits—feeding the narrative to a pliant media, Foxx elevated the exonerated to folklore status. This included convicted cop killers. The murderers were the true victims, after all—the cops, the villains.
The press gobbled it up. Justice, or rather “restorative justice,” was finally being served.
(READ MORE: Leftist Groups Spent $6 Million Fighting Tough-on-Crime Measures—and Lost)
Justice Corrupted—Over and Over
Each story shared the same lead. An exonerated convict gets released from prison after X amount of time in jail for a Crime He Did Not Commit. Alongside the copy splashed the photo of an ecstatic now ex-con embracing lawyers and family members moments after getting released from prison.
Each time, the media ignored the fact that Foxx exonerating someone of a crime doesn’t necessarily mean they are innocent. Conveniently, details of those crimes never made it into the story.
Two infamous cases illustrate Foxx’s love for criminals of color over the rights of their victims to justice.
Recently, Jackie Wilson, convicted twice for his role in the murder of two police officers all the way back in 1982, received $17 million from Cook County in a wrongful conviction settlement. Wilson still has a separate settlement pending with the city of Chicago. Wilson claimed that the police beat him into confessing to the execution style murders of Officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien in the middle of a street on the South Side.
In another case, in October Foxx’s office declined to retry the case of Alexander Villa. Villa and two other known members of a vicious street gang, the Spanish Cobras, faced charges in the 2011 murder of off-duty cop Clifton Lewis. Lewis was shot and killed while working part time as a security guard at a Westside convenience store to earn extra money for his upcoming wedding.
A jury convicted Villa of murder in February 2019. In August 2023 a motion for a retrial was denied and he was sentenced to life. . The other two gang members, Edgardo Colon and Tyrone Clay, had their charges dropped before they went to trial.
Colon and Clay have already filed civil rights suits. A civil lawsuit from Villa is no doubt in the works. In justifying the exoneration, Foxx left some of her own prosecutors hanging out to dry by not defending them against a defense attorney’s allegations of misconduct in the case, and in fact Foxx later repeated the allegations, according to one source close to the case.
When asked by Lewis family members why she was dropping charges against Villa, Foxx told them that there was gross misconduct in the case, the source said.
Yet, a judge presiding in the Villa trial found the allegations of misconduct unfounded.
As for Jackie Wilson, his legal saga came to a head in his third murder trial ordered in 2020 by now-retired Judge William Hooks, a Cook County jurist with a record of coming down hard on the cops. A jury already convicted Jackie in 1983, along with this brother Andrew, for which he received a life sentence. He was re-tried separately from his brother in 1989, and again convicted. He again received a life sentence.
Entrapping the Prosecution?
Cook County prosecutor Nick Trutenko led the prosecution in Wilson’s second trial in 1989. In the third trial in 2020, Foxx’s office called Trutenko as a witness. Another prosecutor, Andrew Horvat, drew the assignment from the state’s attorney’s office to represent Trutenko during the 2020 trial.
On the stand in 2020, Foxx’s prosecutors set Trutenko up for a perjury trap, according to Chicago crime writer and former FOP spokesman, Martin Preib. As Preib writes, attorney Elliot Slosar of the plaintiffs’ firm of Loevy & Loevy pressed Trutenko on a friendship he had with a prison witness, William Coleman, who testified against Wilson in his 1989 trial. Rather than fall for the trap, Trutenko admitted the friendship, pointing out that it began years after the trial ended when he was in private practice, and was therefore irrelevant to the case. Nevertheless, special prosecutors assigned to the case by Foxx’s office quickly dropped all charges against Jackie Wilson.
In his column “Crooked City,” Preib recounted a later exchange between Slosar and defense attorney Jim McKay who cross examined Slosar during Trutenko’s criminal trial.
McKay “suggested Slosar violated the rules of evidence when he didn’t turn over to special prosecutors a crucial baptismal certificate showing that Trutenko was godfather to Coleman’s daughter,” Preib wrote. “McKay’s line of questioning implied that Slosar kept this evidence from prosecutors in the hopes of a big ‘aha’ moment when the document was revealed in court—a moment that Slosar assumed would have compelled Trutenko to lie about his relationship to Coleman in an effort to protect the special prosecutors from their errant claims that Coleman could not be located.”
Preib added that “Trutenko didn’t lie on the stand about knowing Coleman. In fact, he admitted an email exchange a few days before the trial, but the unearthing of the certificate was enough for the humiliated special prosecutors who said Coleman might be deceased to suddenly drop charges against Wilson and set him free, prohibited from being charged again.”
In July 2021, Cook County Judge Alfredo Maldonado appointed Lawrence Oliver as a special prosecutor and gave him broad powers in investigating the Wilson case. In March 2023, Oliver, who previously worked as a corporate lawyer for Boeing for 16 years, hit Trutenko and Horvat with 14 criminal charges between them.
A ruling in that case is expected from Lake County Judge Daniel Shanes – presiding due to a conflict in Cook County – in mid-January.
In the Lewis case, Foxx told the prosecutors accused of misconduct, Nancy Adduci and Andrew Vargo, to step down in January 2023. They were later accused of a Brady violation (withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense), claims that appear in a federal lawsuit against them. But the clams were based in part on cell phone records of the suspects that were not only not withheld from the defense but erroneously showed the suspects not in the vicinity of the crime—they were initially based on Pacific Time, not Central Time.
Foxx fired Adduci in December 2023. Varga resigned days before Villa was “exonerated.”
In August 2024, Adduci filed a civil rights lawsuit against Foxx and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, saying that she was fired because of her age and race. She is 54 and white.
Among other accusations, Adduci’s suit notes that in October 2023 two top Foxx assistants replaced Aducci as chief of the Conviction Integrity Unit, which reviews inmates claims of police abuse and prosecutorial misconduct resulting in wrongful convictions. According to the lawsuit, the two told Aducci they “wanted someone in the position who was more representative of the community.”
Meanwhile, the evidence against Villa is overwhelming:
- Surveillance video shows the crime from multiple angles;
- A car in an alley near the convenience store where the shooters fled matches one owned by Villa’s girlfriend;
- Villa attempted to erase his entire Facebook account after hearing police were near his house;
- A few weeks after the murder, Villa spoke to a friend in the presence of a witness about getting rid of the weapons used in the murder. That witness later testified in the grand jury and at trial regarding what they overheard from Villa regarding his involvement in robbery and murder;
- A witness testified before a grand jury that the day of the murder Villa bragged about killing a “pig.”
On October 3, a Cook County judge ordered a new trial for Villa. Foxx’s office said it would not retry the case and a few days later Villa became a free man.
In a pre-emptive move to force a new trial, lawyers for the Chicago FOP filed a motion on behalf of Lewis’s mother, Maxine Hooks, and his sister, Nicole Johnson. The motion cited protections in the Illinois Rights of Crime Victims and Witnesses Act.
Foxx ignored their pleas.
A New Sheriff in Town
On December 2, former Illinois Appellate Justice Eileen O’Neill Burke was sworn in as Cook County State’s Attorney. Burke ran on a tough-on-crime platform and has already announced some policy changes that follow through on her by-the-book campaign platform. All of Chicagoland would benefit were she to slow the rash of exonerations and support, rather than vilifying the police and prosecutors trying to keep the city safe from violent criminals.
She couldn’t do any worse than George Soros’ hand-picked prosecutor, Kim Foxx.
