vehicle waiting for him. a lot of calls on social media for jussie smollett to be fired from the hit empire show on fox. fox has not made any comment about his future employment going forward, but there are a lot of people who supported him who are very disappointed this story seems to have been turned upside down. we ve been showing what we have just gotten into our newsroom, that booking photo of jussie smollett that has just come in now. you can see it there. he, of course, as you talked about, in custody now. we expect to be seeing him. we ve heard from his attorneys, right, ron? they ve come out and said he enjoys in their words, the presumption of innocence as we look at that podium where we expect to see some action any second. some of those officials are coming out, ron. and it goes without saying but we should say that all of us who are charged in a fashion like this with any sort of crime do enjoy the presumption of innocence, as does jussie smollett. his attorneys say
through circumstantial evidence as they continue their investigation. but for today, this is just preliminaries. and we expect at least that absent some other information, jussie smollett will remain out. he should not be remanded for this crime unless there s some fact we don t know about. but going forward, he and his team will prepare for trial. and they ve already indicated they ll hold the prosecution to its burden of proof and stand by smollett s original statement that he did not lie, that he did not provide false statements. and there is the potential for an fbi investigation by the feds if this prior, to my understanding, threat smollett says he received in the mail turns out to have been a hoax. that s still an open question. if smollett had any part in this alleged letter sent containing a powder, which was a painkiller if he had any part in that, then those crimes, those
questions about it. but as i said, we gave mr. smollett the benefit of the doubt all the way up until that 47th hour of the 48 hours we could hold those two individuals because we just didn t have the total package to support that it was a hoax. when you heard me come out saying we were treating him like a victim, that was the truth because at that time, that s what he was. and anybody that reports a crime deserves the chicago police department to treat them in that fashion until we have solid evidence to prove otherwise. way in the back. [ inaudible ]. well, you know what, they did it because of the financial aspect of it. now whether or not they knew the whole thing would go the way it did. i can tell you all with 100% certainty, the way that they carried this out, there was
an aggressive defense. all along jussie smollett has claimed this was a true story. all along there was some suspicion, not only in the police department and elsewhere, but the police department contended throughout the investigation until the story seemed to fall apart that he was being treated as a victim. that this case was being treated as a possible attack and perhaps a possible hate crime. and again, as we said, the story started to fall apart little by little by little until it could not hold water anymore and last friday police let those two brothers go. said they were cooperating fully with the cpd and they were going to cooperate and testify against jussie smollett which they did just yesterday in front of a grand jury and the grand jury quickly handed up that indictment for disorderly conduct. this is a serious crime here in illinois. it s a class 4 felony, punishable by up to three years imprisonment upon conviction plus a monetary fine. also, if convicted, he could face ju
so in short, we are able to track them initially forward. so after the crime, we were able to see that they fled in a particular direction and eventually got into a cab. our investigators located that cab, interviewed the cab driver. got some video out of that cab. followed that cab using all of these surveillance cameras that are located throughout the city. the pod cameras. to an area up on the north side where they abruptly stopped the cab, got out and walked on foot. again, the community came together to provide us with security footage from their private cameras. so at that point, we then started tracking these two persons of interest backwards. backwards to where they came