“He didn’t even read the whole news article and even posted as his headline the “obama/rezko deal” when in fact it was the Mutual bank/Rezko’s wife deal. Obama purchased the home after the fact making this a non-story unless you think Rezko being a criminal is still newsworthy which it is not since his criminality is common knowledge.”
Perhaps I’m missing something. At face value, Rezko’s wife overpaid $125K for her lot. Obama underpaid $300K for his. Both were purchasing from the same seller. Thus, one could frame this transaction as a $300,000 “gift” to Obama, $125,000 bankrolled by Rezko, $175,000 bankrolled by the seller. The $125K transfer from Rezko’s to Obama could not have been achieved without the bank knowingly and illegally accepting an inflated appraisal used to justify the sales price and mortgage to Rezko’s wife that permitted this transaction to go forward. I’m no lawyer, but I presume that documenting the above and convincing a jury that a known crook, Rezko, helped finance an illegal gift to Senator Obama, would be easier to accomplish than the other component of corruption cited below.
Apart from the apparent “gift” involved in selling Obama property $300K below its actual value, I thought a parallel complaint was that by agreeing to purchase the empty lot next door (and I presume covertly assuring the Obamas they had no intention of building on it), Rezkos provided Obamas with another more intangible “gift:” a much more private lot with less obstructed views (and hence more value were they to ever sell it) than Obamas could have afforded on their own. As best I can tell, the portion of the Rezco lot sold to Obama’s went for fair market value, i.e., the pro rata share of the $500K lot value that the Obama-purchased parcel represented. So any corruption entailed by having a more private lot arises from getting the views/privacy provided by the remaining undeveloped Rezko parcel without having to pay for this. I don’t have time to check, but assuming Obama-purchased parcel was 10% of Rezko lot, the monetary value of this guaranteed-empty lot would be $450,000. So it’s a bigger deal than the $125,000 gift cited earlier, but unless either party was stupid enough to put this understanding in writing, it seems like it’s way harder to prove/prosecute. So in that sense, nailing the bank on the overappraisal is probably a necessary and possibly even sufficient condition for subsequently nailing Rezko on their share of the gift to the Obamas.
It’s already been established that Obama did at least one favor for Rezko while in IL legislature. So this is prima facie evidence that Rezko stood to potentially benefit from giving illegal gifts to Obama. Moreover, Rezko was a savvy developer: it wouldn’t make sense that his wife wouldn’t know the property she was acquiring was 25% overpriced.
In contrast, I don’t know the other seller. In theory, it might be far harder to establish that individual would benefit by a gift to Obama: this seller’s best defense strategy might be to admit that Rezko convinced him to reduce the price of Obama’s lot by $125,000 in exchange for the assurance that he would get $125,000 extra for the lot sold to Rezko’s wife. Rather than concede that the additional $175,000 price reduction was a gift, he might argue that on a $1.6 million property that hadn’t sold in X months, $175K was a reasonable price concession to get it off his hands etc.
So while the timing of Drudge’s story is a puzzle and he got the headline wrong, I do think the GJ investigation into the Mutual/Rezko deal is part and parcel of a larger effort that eventually points to Obama. Remember that in his zeal to get to someone as high as possible (likely Cheney, but he had to settle for Scooter), Fitz was perfectly willing to give Armitage a complete pass on being the first to name Valerie Plame. An overzealous prosecutor can be a very dangerous thing, but every once in a while, s/he can accomplish something very useful. It would be nice to think that enough of this case will have leaked out by 1/20/09 that Obama would be unable to risk the political fallout that would accompany his firing Fitz.
Yes, it does all look fishy but the fact remains that the actual crime occurred in the Mutual Bank/Rezko wife deal. That was completed and then the house was later sold to Obama. Since Obama came into the picture after the crimes occurred and had no direct involvement in that crime, he is free and clear. It may indeed be scandalous or look slimy, but that isn’t a crime for which concrete evidence exists.