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He (Genson) sure has an unusual perspective:

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5. Ed Genson is already signaling his defense.

“The case that I’ve seen so far is significantly exaggerated. It’s not what people think it is.”

I saw another report that Genson will argue that the Senate seat imbroglio was just “political shop talk.”

But as Mark Brown writes this morning, the “just politics” defense “has come up a loser in several recent federal criminal cases here from George Ryan to Robert Sorich.”

Or, as I wrote in my profile of Genson in 2005 (last time I’ll link to this, I swear!):

It’s a defense he’s been using for years.

When the mobbed-up power brokers of the old First Ward were tried in the early 1990s, Genson told a jury, “This case does not involve fixes. It’s about old men brought up in a different system. It involves favors that are clearly political, but not against the law. That’s all politics is - favors. This, ladies and gentlemen, is old-time politics.’

I asked Genson how he could really believe that.

“The laws governing federal prosecution are so nebulous, they’re so general, that what is a crime to one United States attorney is not a crime to another,” he said. “And what this [U.S. attorney] is doing is taking a political favor and elevating it to a crime. And nobody knew that was a crime.

Now, [Scott] Fawell took a little bit of leeway - a little, but not much. And every one of the things he was indicted for - political people getting state jobs, people on state jobs doing political things while they’re on state jobs - this is not a new thing. The fact is, he did what everyone else did.”

I reminded Genson that the way things have always worked includes a steady pattern of indictments for business-as-usual.

“No!” he bellowed. “No! Because nobody’s ever been indicted for that! Nobody’s ever been indicted for doing that in Illinois.

Oh, yeah, political corruption trials where people take money - I mean, all you gotta do to know that’s illegal is to read the Ten Commandments! But if you sit in your state office and make a bunch of phone calls to the ward committeemen to get their vote, that’s been done forever!”

http://www.beachwoodreporter.com/