December 10, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
State of Shame By SCOTT TUROW
Chicago
HERE in Chicago, where we are accustomed to news that challenges the thresholds of belief, we awoke Tuesday to find that our governor, Rod Blagojevich, had become the second Illinois chief executive in a row to be subjected to criminal charges.
The 76-page criminal complaint implies that Mr. Blagojevich was such an inveterate schemer that despite being the obvious target of a three-year federal grand jury investigation into trading state jobs and contracts for campaign contributions, he had to be taken out of his house in handcuffs to prevent him from selling off the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.
Even by Chicago's picaresque standards, Tuesday's developments are mind-boggling, even more so to a former federal prosecutor like me with an understanding of some of the nuances of the federal criminal justice system. The most worrisome element is that Mr. Blagojevich's shameless behavior seems to have put Chicago's United States attorney, the estimable Patrick Fitzgerald, into the unenviable position of having to bring a case before he was ready.
Mr. Fitzgerald has lived by the Machiavellian motto that if you shoot at the king, you had better kill the king. Mr. Fitzgerald's highest-profile prosecutions — like those of I. Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and of Mr. Blagojevich's predecessor as governor, George Ryan — have been assembled methodically, with an almost obsessive desire to tie down evidentiary details before charges are returned.
Furthermore, Mr. Fitzgerald has a history of trying not to use the justice system to pre-empt the operation of other democratic institutions. Thus, despite a more than five-year investigation, the Ryan indictment was withheld until after the governor left office in 2003, and Mr. Fitzgerald did not oppose a defense request to schedule Mr. Libby's perjury and obstruction justice trial after the 2006 midterm elections.
Undoubtedly one of the events Patrick Fitzgerald has no desire to influence is his own possible reappointment as United States attorney for four more years (all United States attorneys can be replaced by the incoming administration). Mr. Fitzgerald's effectiveness as a prosecutor is unquestioned, and the state's senior senator, the Democrat Dick Durbin, has said Mr. Fitzgerald can stay in the job if he wants to.
But the Justice Department may have other thoughts. Mr. Fitzgerald has held the job since October 2001, some may argue that a position with such extraordinary discretionary powers should not lay in the same hands for 12 years.
Moreover, Mr. Fitzgerald's bare-knuckle methods have rankled many in the Chicago bar. For example, he got George Ryan's chief of staff, Scott Fawell, to testify against his former boss by threatening to imprison Mr. Fawell's girlfriend for perjury.
In his news conference Tuesday, Mr. Fitzgerald indicated that he hadn't planned to indict Governor Blagojevich until next spring, meaning that the prosecutor was going to wait until his own fate was decided. Instead, with wiretap evidence piling up that showed that Mr. Blagojevich was intent on selling the Obama seat in exchange for a substantial personal benefit, like a high-paying job for himself or his wife, Mr. Fitzgerald was forced to make the arrest. He decided that he could not even wait for the grand jury investigating Mr. Blagojevich to meet on Thursday and indict him.
Bypassing the grand jury and proceeding through a criminal complaint instead effectively puts the case against Mr. Blagojevich on the express route. Mr. Fitzgerald will now have only 20 days to either give the governor a preliminary hearing — which would amount to free discovery for his defense lawyer — or return an indictment. Given Mr. Fitzgerald's frank appeal for information from the public at his news conference, it's obvious that his case is not fully buttoned up, and that Mr. Blagojevich forced the prosecutor's hand.
All of this news comes with personal chagrin for me because I was Governor Blagojevich's first appointment to the Illinois Executive Ethics Commission, a body created his first year in office. (For the record, I have never made a campaign donation to him.) The commission judges ethics complaints against state officials, supervises ethics instruction, and tries to carry out an overall mandate to improve the ethical climate in Illinois.
Ethics reform in Illinois is often regarded as an oxymoron, and I admit that the commission's arduous efforts to strengthen our ethics laws have met with little success. Speaking solely for myself, I hope the governor's arrest galvanizes public outrage and at last speeds reform.
One change that is obviously indispensable is overhauling the campaign contribution laws in Illinois, where there are literally no limits on political donations — neither how big they can be or who can give them. The lone exception is a law, passed over a Blagojevich veto, that takes effect Jan. 1, prohibiting large state contractors from donating to the executive officer who gave them the business. Otherwise, anybody — union officials, regulated industries, corporations, lobbyists — can throw as much money as they like at Illinois politicians.
This astonishing state of affairs persists 32 years after the Supreme Court, in Buckley v. Valeo, recognized "the actuality and appearance of corruption resulting from large individual financial contributions" in approving limits on such donations to candidates for federal office. One can only hope that even in Illinois we are too ashamed now to tolerate business as usual.
Scott Turow is writing a sequel to his novel "Presumed Innocent."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/opinion/10turow.html?sq=Turow&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/83jve
Showing posts with label Blagojevich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blagojevich. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Roll Over, Abe Lincoln By TIMOTHY EGAN
December 10, 2008
Op-Ed Guest Columnist
Roll Over, Abe Lincoln By TIMOTHY EGAN
For some time now, the most unpopular governor in the United States, Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, has been treated like a flu virus at a nursing home.
"He's kryptonite," one state representative called him in a Chicago Magazine profile last February. "Nobody wants to get near him."
But it wasn't until Tuesday, and the filing of a 76-page criminal complaint centered around the auctioning of a Senate seat, that we got a full X-ray of politics at its sickest.
Putting aside the peculiar dialect of desperation that made the governor sound like a John Malkovich character in a David Mamet play, the complaint showed a man trolling the depths of darkness.
The beloved Cubs, the sainted Warren Buffett, editorial writers from the Chicago Tribune, even financing for a children's hospital — all were targets or leverage points for a shakedown.
The surprise is that he didn't offer to sell out exclusive rights to deep-dish pizza.
If the world was roused by the sight from Chicago barely one month ago, hundreds of thousands of people streaming into Grant Park to celebrate the triumph of possibility over tainted history, the arrest of Governor Blagojevich on a dark and drizzly Chicago dawn was quite the opposite image.
Abe Lincoln may have rolled over once in pleasant surprise at the election of Barack Obama, and another time in revulsion at Blagojevich's arrest, as prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said. More likely, Abe did a triple lutz in his grave on Tuesday.
If nothing else, Blagojevich did Obama the favor of a nonendorsement quote for the ages. According to the federal transcript, the governor showed disgust, barely a week after Obama's election, that he could not get anything in return for offering the Senate seat to an ally of the president-elect.
"They're not willing to give me anything except appreciation," the governor says, as outlined in the criminal complaint.
It would be somewhat comforting if there were a larger lesson here, or a map out of the banality of evil. But there is no trend or modern twist, no evidence of a greater criminal web, no overarching moral. Like a kid who beats up old ladies just because he knows no other way, the allegations against Blagojevich amount to what Fitzgerald called a crime spree, of the political variety.
The prosecutor's narrative of plotting bad intentions and narcissism — Blago actually thought he was a viable candidate for president in 2016 — is a particularly graphic example of why some men see things as they are and ask: what's in it for me?
Fitzgerald, who prosecuted Scooter Libby under the pressure of a White House not used to getting questioned by anyone, is the son of a Manhattan doorman and the product of Catholic schools at their finest. It's unlikely that his dad ever heard anything to match the conversations captured by federal wiretaps in Illinois.
Like all damaged politicians, the Blagojevich in the complaint knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
What's a Senate seat worth? "Golden," and the governor vowed that he would not give it up for nothing.
How about help for the Tribune Company's attempt to sell Wrigley Field and the Cubs? That would require getting rid of editorial writers who had called for his resignation. Fire them all, Blagojevich is quoted as having said, adding, "And get us some editorial support."
Aid for a children's hospital? That would require a contribution of at least $50,000.
On and on it goes, trash talk of the want-to-be-rich-and-infamous. Even by Illinois standards, where the path from the Statehouse to the jailhouse holds the footprints of numerous governors, Tuesday's arrest and complaint was breathtaking.
"If it isn't the most corrupt state in the United States," said Robert Grant, a F.B.I. special agent, "it's one hell of a competitor."
On Monday, the eve of his arrest, Blagojevich showed that he could include hubris among his many flirtations with disaster. At a rally of out-of-work factory hands soiled by his presence, he all but asked to be followed and recorded.
"I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead," he said. "I can tell you whatever I say is always lawful."
Then, like Huey Long at his most egregious, he cast himself as the person who has nothing to sell but an honest day's labor. If you were to tape him, he added, you would hear a governor "who tirelessly and endlessly figures out ways to help average, ordinary working people."
Substitute one word — himself — for working people, and you have the essence of Governor Blagojevich.
Timothy Egan writes Outposts, a column at nytimes.com.
Maureen Dowd is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/opinion/10egan.html?sq=Egan&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/83jrk
Op-Ed Guest Columnist
Roll Over, Abe Lincoln By TIMOTHY EGAN
For some time now, the most unpopular governor in the United States, Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, has been treated like a flu virus at a nursing home.
"He's kryptonite," one state representative called him in a Chicago Magazine profile last February. "Nobody wants to get near him."
But it wasn't until Tuesday, and the filing of a 76-page criminal complaint centered around the auctioning of a Senate seat, that we got a full X-ray of politics at its sickest.
Putting aside the peculiar dialect of desperation that made the governor sound like a John Malkovich character in a David Mamet play, the complaint showed a man trolling the depths of darkness.
The beloved Cubs, the sainted Warren Buffett, editorial writers from the Chicago Tribune, even financing for a children's hospital — all were targets or leverage points for a shakedown.
The surprise is that he didn't offer to sell out exclusive rights to deep-dish pizza.
If the world was roused by the sight from Chicago barely one month ago, hundreds of thousands of people streaming into Grant Park to celebrate the triumph of possibility over tainted history, the arrest of Governor Blagojevich on a dark and drizzly Chicago dawn was quite the opposite image.
Abe Lincoln may have rolled over once in pleasant surprise at the election of Barack Obama, and another time in revulsion at Blagojevich's arrest, as prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said. More likely, Abe did a triple lutz in his grave on Tuesday.
If nothing else, Blagojevich did Obama the favor of a nonendorsement quote for the ages. According to the federal transcript, the governor showed disgust, barely a week after Obama's election, that he could not get anything in return for offering the Senate seat to an ally of the president-elect.
"They're not willing to give me anything except appreciation," the governor says, as outlined in the criminal complaint.
It would be somewhat comforting if there were a larger lesson here, or a map out of the banality of evil. But there is no trend or modern twist, no evidence of a greater criminal web, no overarching moral. Like a kid who beats up old ladies just because he knows no other way, the allegations against Blagojevich amount to what Fitzgerald called a crime spree, of the political variety.
The prosecutor's narrative of plotting bad intentions and narcissism — Blago actually thought he was a viable candidate for president in 2016 — is a particularly graphic example of why some men see things as they are and ask: what's in it for me?
Fitzgerald, who prosecuted Scooter Libby under the pressure of a White House not used to getting questioned by anyone, is the son of a Manhattan doorman and the product of Catholic schools at their finest. It's unlikely that his dad ever heard anything to match the conversations captured by federal wiretaps in Illinois.
Like all damaged politicians, the Blagojevich in the complaint knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
What's a Senate seat worth? "Golden," and the governor vowed that he would not give it up for nothing.
How about help for the Tribune Company's attempt to sell Wrigley Field and the Cubs? That would require getting rid of editorial writers who had called for his resignation. Fire them all, Blagojevich is quoted as having said, adding, "And get us some editorial support."
Aid for a children's hospital? That would require a contribution of at least $50,000.
On and on it goes, trash talk of the want-to-be-rich-and-infamous. Even by Illinois standards, where the path from the Statehouse to the jailhouse holds the footprints of numerous governors, Tuesday's arrest and complaint was breathtaking.
"If it isn't the most corrupt state in the United States," said Robert Grant, a F.B.I. special agent, "it's one hell of a competitor."
On Monday, the eve of his arrest, Blagojevich showed that he could include hubris among his many flirtations with disaster. At a rally of out-of-work factory hands soiled by his presence, he all but asked to be followed and recorded.
"I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead," he said. "I can tell you whatever I say is always lawful."
Then, like Huey Long at his most egregious, he cast himself as the person who has nothing to sell but an honest day's labor. If you were to tape him, he added, you would hear a governor "who tirelessly and endlessly figures out ways to help average, ordinary working people."
Substitute one word — himself — for working people, and you have the essence of Governor Blagojevich.
Timothy Egan writes Outposts, a column at nytimes.com.
Maureen Dowd is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/opinion/10egan.html?sq=Egan&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/83jrk
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