Former President Bush offers ‘no comment’ on Cordoba House/mosque controversy.
Rand Paul has a new position on the Cordoba House Project: as a libertarian and believer in private property rights he believes it should be left to local authorities to decide. But he doesn’t believe it should be built. Says the campaign: “In Dr. Paul’s opinion, the Muslim community would better serve the healing process by making a donation to the memorial fund for the victims of September 11th.”
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.
A longtime TPM Reader weighs in on the Blago verdict …
This verdict should not be a surprise to anyone. For a long time knowledgeable observers in Chicago have looked at the government’s charges and really thought that there was no there there. The fact that the Governor had not benefited at all from any of his alleged machinations played a huge role.
But looking at the case, you really see that Fitzgerald blew it. Essentially these charges were drawn up overnight after the Chicago Tribune called Fitzgerald in his office and told him that they were running a story the next day that the U.S. Attorney’s Office was tapping the Governor’s telephones. Not a single completed crime had occurred.