The trial of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is under way in Chicago, with federal prosecutors presenting a leaner, simpler case than the one that ended in near-failure for them nine months ago.
This time, jurors are being introduced early on to perhaps the most striking element of the government’s case: that the then-governor put the Senate seat of Barack Obama up for auction after Obama was elected president in 2008.
“It was his thing, his golden thing,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Niewoehner of the Northern District of Illinois told the jury in his opening statement Monday, according to an account by Ashby Jones on The Wall Street Journal Law Blog. “He was going to get something for himself in exchange for it.”
In the first trial, which ended in a conviction on only one of 24 counts after jurors “hung” on all the others, jurors said afterward that they were a bit confused by the chronological approach used by prosecutors. To put it another way, perhaps the prosecutors gave the jurors too much information, or at least too much information that wasn’t vital.
Daniel Cain, the lead FBI agent in the investigation, and John Harris, the ex-governor’s last chief of staff, were on the list as early witnesses — a clear signal, in the opinion of case-watchers, that the issue of the Senate seat would be paramount.
Even in something as serious as a criminal trial, there can be humor, as indicated by an early back-and-forth reported by The Chicago Tribune.
Blagojevich’s lawyer, Sheldon Sorosky, complained out of the earshot of jurors that the prosecutors were trying to suggest guilt by association by recalling Blagojevich’s 2006 remarks condemning his predecessor, George Ryan, after Ryan’s corruption conviction.
This prompted a question from Judge James Zagel: “Have we gotten to the point in Illinois that when we say someone’s a governor it is to say something bad about him?”
Hmmm. Before Ryan and Blagojevich, there was Otto Kerner, governor from 1961 to 1968. He was chairman of a commission that investigated civil disorders in the 1960s, then a federal judge — and then he went to prison for taking bribes.
