Blagojevich: Play ALL wiretaps in court

Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich — famously caught on tape calling a U.S. Senate seat appointment (bleepin’) golden — said today he wants to make sure that the jury that will hear the corruption case against him gets to hear that recording.

And Blagojevich, rather than back away from the tapes that attracted national attention, said he is “laying down the gauntlet” and also wants his future jury to hear everything else he was caught saying on secret FBI wiretaps.

“I’ve instructed my lawyers to petition the court, petition so that every second, every minute, every hour that the government secretly taped me is provided to both sides to be heard and played in court,” Blagojevich said minutes after pleading not guilty in a federal courtroom in Chicago to a new indictment in his case.

“And I challenge the government, I challenge the government: If you are on the side of truth and justice as you say you are, and if this was a crime spree like you claim it was, then don’t hide behind technicalities,” Blagojevich said. “Play all the tapes. Play all the tapes. Play the truth, and play the whole truth.”

Later, Blagojevich’s lawyer, Sam Adam Jr., pulled back a bit from that, saying that the former governor wants every tape played that’s relevant to his corruption case.

“We are saying either side can play any minute of any tape that they wish to play,” Adam said.

Blagojevich said he thinks he can contest the original finding that there was probable cause to believe a crime was committed, which allowed the wiretaps to be placed in the first place.

Still, he pleaded not guilty to a revised indictment today, said he will waive any challenge to the playing of the tapes and will ask that the tapes be played at his June corruption trial in federal court in Chicago.

“I enter a plea of innocent to each and every charge,” the former governor, dressed in a dark suit and red tie, told U.S. District Judge James Zagel.

Previoiusly, prosecutors have alluded to the hundreds of hours of recordings that have been publicly viewed as a point of strength in their case.

Last week, a federal grand jury in Chicago re-indicted Blagojevich, adding eight new counts to his corruption case. That makes 24 charges the ex-governor now faces.

The new charges were crafted to keep the case on track even if the U.S. Supreme Court decides in a separate case to gut the federal “honest services” law that also was a key to the original charges against Blagojevich.

The former governor faces accusations that include trying to sell an appointment ti fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President Obama.

Other allegations include charges that Blagojevich tried to extort Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, then a congressman representing Chicago’s Northwest Side. Blagojevich is accused of holding up grant money to a school in Emanuel’s district because Emanuel’s brother hadn't held a campaign fund-raiser for Blagojevich.

Timeline Advisor A = Tom Balanoff, head of SEIU Illinois State Council?

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Blagojevich went fishing for post in Obama’s cabinet
Star-Ledger, The (Newark, NJ) - Thursday, December 25, 2008
Author: DAVID LIGHTMAN, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Rod Blagojevich , the secretary of health and human services?

Apparently, the embattled Illinois governor thought it might be a good idea for him to be President-elect Barack Obama’s point man for one of the most difficult, highest-priority issues that the incoming 44th president plans to tackle.

It came up in a conversation between Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett - who thought that the notion of any cabinet post for Blagojevich was “ridiculous” - and Illinois union official Tom Balanoff , who also was very skeptical, according to the Obama team’s review of contacts with the governor.

Federal prosecutors allege that Blagojevich talked about trying to secure a cabinet appointment or an ambassadorship in return for naming a successor who was acceptable to Obama, who resigned his Senate seat last month.

The four-page Obama report found no inappropriate contact between Obama and his staff and Blagojevich and his staff.

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has said Obama, who had held the seat since January 2005, wasn’t involved in the matter, and the president-elect has said he knew nothing about the schemes.

Jarrett was thought to be a contender for the job, but she took herself out of the running Nov. 9. Five days later, Obama said she would be a senior adviser in his White House.

On Nov. 7, the report said, Jarrett, then still a potential Senate contender, spoke with Balanoff , who heads the Services Employees International Union Illinois State Council.

Jarrett said she had “no contact or communication” with Blagojevich or his staff about the vacancy. Balanoff isn’t a member of the governor’s staff and “did not purport to speak for the governor on that occasion,” the report says.

Balanoff said he’d talked to Blagojevich about naming Jarrett to Obama’s Senate seat, according to Jarrett, and “told her that the governor had raised with him the question of whether the governor might be considered as a possible candidate to head up the Department of Health and Human Services in the new administration.”

According to Jarrett, Balanoff told Blagojevich , “It would never happen.”

Balanoff “did not suggest that the governor, in talking about HHS, was linking a position for himself in the Obama Cabinet to the selection of the president-elect’s successor in the Senate,” the review adds.

(snip)

http://obamawtf.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html

His father, Benjamin, was born in Jerusalem, the son of pharmacists who had escaped the Russian pogroms. In the 1940s Benjamin Emanuel interrupted his medical school training in Switzerland to take part in an unsuccessful scheme to smuggle guns from Czechoslovakia to the Israeli underground. He later served as a medic in the 1948 Israeli war of independence. (Rahm would echo his father’s dedication during the Gulf war: With Iraqi Scuds falling on his father’s home country, he volunteered for military-vehicle-maintenance duty near the Lebanese border.)

In 1953, Dr. Emanuel’s medical training brought him to the States, where he met Marsha, then an X-ray technician at Chicago’s Mount Sinai hospital. They married and, after a brief return to Israel, settled down in Chicago. Dr. Emanuel’s pediatrics practice on the North Side’s Lincoln Avenue drew a passel of immigrants, and eventually became-with his partners-one of the largest in the city. (Decades later the “Doc’s” families would turn out to vote for his son in a congressional election.)

Money was tight in the early years. The family left their first Chicago apartment because it was rat-infested. They were kicked out of their second apartment because tenants complained that the three rambunctious boys were too loud. Yet Chicago also meant a lively street life of playing hoops in the park and building go-carts in the alley with the artist who lived upstairs.

That came to an end when Rahm was 9 and their immigrant father achieved the American dream of buying a house in the suburbs, the lakeside Republican enclave of Wilmette. The boys, recalls brother Zeke, missed the city. “The suburbs never grafted on to us,” he says.

The boys also joined their mother on most civil rights demonstrations within a 50-mile radius of Chicago. “I only brought the kids if I thought it was going to be peaceful, with no arrests,” Marsha Emanuel insists. (Though it wasn’t always predictable; she wore a dress and had a dinner party planned when she was carted off by cops for her first overnight jail term.)

Marsha’s father was a burly Moldavian immigrant who arrived alone on a ship at age 10. He went on to become a union organizer. Politics-loud and argumentative-infused Marsha’s childhood; her three boys got their own dose from trips in their grandfather’s delivery truck.

Rahm jumped into politics right after his graduation from Sarah Lawrence College, where he promised his mother he would take advantage of the campus’s stellar dance program but never did. He quickly discovered a penchant for fundraising, which he applied to campaigns for Senator Paul Simon, the DCCC, and Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley. In 1991 he joined Clinton’s presidential campaign. Emanuel wowed the team from the start, opening a spigot on needed campaign funds, and after Clinton’s election helped program a picture-perfect inaugural. He nabbed the plum White House position of political director.

Then he started shooting off his mouth. There was the time he rapped on a conference table to get “Lloyd’s” attention. (”We were all aghast,” recalls one Clinton aide, noting that even Lloyd Bentsen’s wife still called the Treasury Secretary “Senator.” ) He had a very public run-in with the late Senator Patrick Moynihan, who accused him of being the source of an anonymous quote that “we’ll roll all over [Moynihan] if we have to” on welfare reform. (Emanuel denied saying it.) Most damaging were Emanuel’s battles with Hillary Clinton loyalists, who accused him of leaks about the travel office episode.

A year after Clinton took office, Emanuel was demoted. “He was very upset,” recalls Zeke. “He thought he was going to get kicked out of the White House.” He didn’t, and neither did he quit. Instead, Emanuel regrouped, helping lead the charge on key Clinton initiatives, including the crime bill, the assault weapons ban, and NAFTA. “He was constantly on the offense,” says Begala. Emanuel planned to leave after the 1996 election, but Clinton promoted him to take George Stephanopoulos’s spot as senior advisor for policy and strategy.

Still, Emanuel had political aspirations of his own, which necessitated some financial security. So in late 1998 he traded in Clinton as his boss for Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor and Wall Street financier. “Money is not the be-all and end-all for him,” says brother Zeke. “But he knew he needed money so that wouldn’t be a problem while he was doing public service.” Over a 2 1/2-year period he helped broker deals-often using political connections-for Wasserstein Perella.

According to congressional financial disclosures, he earned more than $18 million during that period. His deals included Unicom’s merger with Peco Energy and venture fund GTCR Golder Rauner’s purchase of SBC subsidiary SecurityLink. But friends say his compensation also benefited from two sales of the Wasserstein firm itself, first to Dresdner Bank and then to Allianz AG.

By 2002, Emanuel emerged as a wealthy man with a reputation as a battle-hardened national strategist. That year he won a tough primary race for a seat in Congress that paid $138,000. His 1994 White House demotion was ancient history.

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Three former Illinois governors have gone to prison in the past 35 years, and a host of other governors have gotten into legal trouble.

_Otto Kerner, a Democrat who was governor from 1961 to 1968, served less than a year of a three-year sentence after his 1973 conviction on bribery, tax evasion and other counts. He was convicted of arranging favorable horse racing dates as governor in return for getting horse racing association stock at reduced prices. Kerner died in 1976.

_Dan Walker, a Democrat who was governor from 1973 to 1977, served 1 1/2 years of a seven-year sentence after pleading guilty in 1987 to bank fraud, misapplication of funds and perjury. The charges were not related to his service as governor.

_George Ryan, a Republican who was governor from 1999 to 2003, was convicted of corruption in 2006 for steering state contracts and leases to political insiders and helping cover up bribes paid in return for truck drivers licenses while he was secretary of state and then governor. He is serving a 6 1/2-year prison term.

In addition, William Stratton, Illinois governor from 1953-1961, was later indicted but was acquitted on charges of income tax evasion.

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