Chicago City Wire

President Joe Biden has nominated April Perry, a former official with the Cook County State’s Attorney Office, to be the next U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. If approved by the Senate, Perry would replace John Lausch, who retired on March 11.

A former Chicago Fraternal of Police Official, Martin Preib, blasted the nomination saying that Perry, Kim Foxx’s Chief Ethics Officer from 2017 to 2019, said nothing publicly when Foxx dropped the charges – in the face of overwhelming police evidence -- against actor Jussie Smollett for faking a hate crime. Perry resigned her position a few months after the charges were dropped. She went on to serve as a hearing officer for the Chicago Police Board, a disciplinary board long criticized by the FOP for harboring an anti-police bias.

“Perry never came forward and told the public what really happened,” Preib, spokesman for the FOP from 2017 to 2020, told Chicago City Wire in reference to the Smollett case. “She has never publicly condemned Foxx’s actions. Like so much of what happens in Chicago’s countless backrooms, the real happenings of the Smollett case remain yet another dirty little Cook County secret.”

While the Smollett case grabbed the headlines, the bigger scandal involving Foxx’s office have been dozens of exonerations of convicted murderers based on specious allegations of police misconduct, Preib said.

“The exoneration of criminals for vicious murders began taking shape almost minutes after Foxx took her oath of office, freeing one convicted killer after another on the flimsiest, most dubious claims,” Preib said. “Some of these convicted killers were represented by law firms who supported Foxx’s campaign, a fact rarely touched upon by a media in a city that will catalogue what an accused cop ate for breakfast thirty years ago. One reason the media got away with never mentioning it was the fact Perry never mentioned it either, the woman who served as Foxx’s chief of ‘ethics.’”

Preib urged the Senate to reject Perry’s nomination.

Perry was one of two finalists for the position announced in March by Democratic U.S. Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago has more than 300 employees, including 130 prosecutors and more than two dozen attorneys who focus on civil litigation.

In the Smollett case, a special prosecutor, former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb, was appointed after Foxx dismissed the charges.

In a December 2021 WTTW Chicago Tonight interview, Webb said Foxx's office could not explain how it came to the decision to dismiss the original disorderly conduct indictment filed against Smollett, calling that move ‘massive confusion and an operational failure.'”

“To totally dismiss the entire case, require no plea of guilty by Mr. Smollett at all … just give him a complete pass so he can walk out on the street and say to Chicago: ‘Goodbye, I did nothing wrong and I’m out of here,’ after what he did to the Chicago Police Department, for that resolution to have occurred is a disgrace,” Webb said. “It is a disgrace and that’s what caused this whole thing.”

Webb asked the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC) to investigate Foxx and her office.

Foxx, who first won election in 2016, announced in April she will not run for re-election in 2024.