In a drug bust
You watch and wait, until the transaction has taken place. so that you can nail as many of the people involved as possible.
Does anyone else wonder why Rod Blowdryavitch was taken down BEFORE he did anything illegal? Before he did any of ther things he was only talking about?
Look for Rod to be exhonorated. Think about all the people he wasn’t able to finger. And tell me that Fitz is not on the Daley payroll.
The reasoning from the Feds is that they moved in to prevent a crime from being committed — to keep the Gov from selling the vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. The claim was made that originally they planned to hold off on charging the Governor on various offenses until after his term had expired but that they could not in good conscience stand by while he committed this further felony.
Perhaps they hoped that he would take a page from the Eliot Spitzer playbook and resign before he was tried, before he was impeached, etc. Save everybody the trouble.
I dunno this guy but he appears to be calling out of the Jim “Possumhead” Traficant playbook instead. (Speaking of fascinating felons, I note that Traficant is still in federal durance vile for his misdeeds, though supposedly he is scheduled for release this fall. He was originally scheduled to be transferred to a halfway house in March and he turned it down, you gotta appreciate a man who does things different. Maybe Blago should adopt Traficant’s old motto, “Beam me up.”)
I defer to those with more knowledge of the situation but instead of being protected or shielded by Machine politics, to the contrary, it does appear that Governor Blagojevich stands alone and unsupported. His attorney on the impeachment charge has refused to represent him any further.
Richard Daley has openly referred to the Governor as “cuckoo.” That does not sound to me like a man who is wired into the system.
Blagojevich is married to the daughter of a Chicago alderman — Richard Mell helped his son in law get elected — but that relationship has soured and Mell has been openly critical of his son in law.
Finally I note that yesterday Mrs. Patricia Mell Blagojevich was fired from her job as a fundraiser for the Chicago Christian Industrial League. If things were going that good for them she’d still have a job.
I do note that all federal prosecutors are currently holding on to their jobs but can be replaced at any time by the new administration. Obama has already said he has no plans to remove Patrick Fitzgerald and he will continue on in his current position, so there’s no help for Blago from the Obamanation either. Obama called on Blago to resign.
So what am I not seeing here, Og?
Jenny
take what i wrote at face value and dont buy the ‘moved in before crime was committed’ bullshit because it is simply that- bullshit. the move was timed so that no punishable criminal offense was committed. Blago is precisely correct: he has done nothing wrong.
This is to keep a real trial from coming, so no one can sit on a witness stand and inconveniently witness about others. I don’t see how a grand jury would state that there was enough traction for a trial.
Milorad hung himself when he went after Mel for corruption, to prove he was his own man and not Mel’s little boy.
We’ll all die of old age before the truth surfaces.
A very likely crime’s already been committed – conspiracy.
As long as he took even one concrete action towards committing the selling of the office, which I’m pretty sure he must have, they can convict on conspiracy charges.
Plus they appear to have him dead to rights on various smaller charges of abuse of power, bribery, etc. related to the newspaper intimidation and using public projects improperly for personal gain, all of that.
Sigi, that’s all just the way business is done in the city.
Don’t remember where I read it, but I saw several references to the fact that a newspaper (Chicago Sun-Times??) was going to break the story so they had to move in.
Blago’s making a lot of noise about being railroaded by the Illinois state government for impeachment – and he may be right, the rules seem to deny him some pretty important rights.
Impeachment’s only one thing, though. What may be much more serious is the federal charge of corruption, and I haven’t heard or seen that that case is being ruined.
Time, I think, will tell on this one. Blago may win the impeachment issue on some kind of appeal, because the rules are wrong. I don’t know if he’ll be able to survive the federal corruption charges, though – and he might bring a few other bad apples down with him.
We’ll just have to see how it all plays out.
Well Fitzgerald papered 6 of Obama’s people the other day in connection with this…..maybe….who knows, it is Chicago.