Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Rezko Trial Update   [Stephen Spruiell]

Today was another bad day for Tony Rezko and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Star witness for the prosecution Stuart Levine described a meeting he had with two of Blagojevich's top fundraisers and advisers — Rezko and a roofing contractor named Chris Kelly — at which they asked him to arrange for an investor with business before Levine's board either to pay a $2 million bribe or raise $1.5 million for Blagojevich's campaign.

Levine's a less-than-credible witness, so to bolster the believability of his account, prosecutors played a phone conversation between Levine and another alleged schemer named Bill Cellini Robert Weinstein that occurred shortly after Levine's meeting with Rezko and Kelly. During the conversation, which the feds recorded without Levine or Cellini's Weinstein's knowledge, the two of them discussed Rezko, Kelly and the scheme to extort the investor, a Hollywood producer and financier named Thomas Rosenberg.

Of course, Blagojevich can plausibly deny any knowledge of his top fundraisers' alleged illegal acts, but as I wrote today, the scandals involving his administration have accumulated. I ended my piece last night with this:

Blagojevich was supposed to represent a new day in Springfield, and therein lies a lesson for those Americans enamored of Barack Obama and his message of change. Illinois voters have some recent experience electing a young, ambitious, hard-charging Democrat who promised them a break from the past. Last November, over half of them said they would vote to recall him.

Sure enough, today's Chicago Tribune carries an editorial calling on the state legislature to pass a recall provision:

Blagojevich's reign follows the certifiably corrupt term of George Ryan. Whenever such failed leaders don't have the personal dignity to stop pocketing a paycheck from citizens, those citizens shouldn't have to wait for the next election to declare, "You are serving your interests, not ours. You are dismissed."

Blagojevich has earned that distinction.

One doubts that today's testimony did anything to change the editors' minds.

04/01 06:18 PMShare