Another TPM Reader from the defense bar weighs in with his own verdict on the Blago verdict: never talk to the government.
That’s a lawyers’ argument. No doubt. But having watched a lot of public corruption cases from start to finish over the last decade, I have to say there’s a lot of truth in what he says. A lot of these public corruption charges are just really hard to make stick. There’s no getting around that. Especially the ones that center on some alleged quid pro quo. And when people do get convicted of stuff, or find themselves compelled to plea out, more often than not it’s on ancillary charges, often for lying to federal investigators, rather than for acts that made them crooked in the first place.
As our other TPM Reader noted earlier, it looks now that Fitzgerald just never had that strong a case on the law — in good measure because press leaks forced his hand and made him bring the charges before the corrupt transactions had been completed. That’s the paradox of this one. Before the bar of common sense, Fitzgerald had more than enough evidence to show that Blago was as crooked a pol as Chicago had produced in some time, which is saying something. But on the law, the case maybe just wasn’t that solid. It will be interesting to hear what the jury has to say.
