Whether Rod Blagojevich is a slippery liar who corrupted the state’s highest office or just a politician who was innocently thinking out loud when he allegedly tried to sell a U.S. Senate seat is now up to a federal jury to decide.
The case against the former governor was given to jurors late Thursday afternoon following closing arguments that left both Blagojevich and his wife, Patti, wiping away tears. Deliberations were expected to begin Friday morning, seven weeks after the jury was seated for Blagojevich’s retrial.
Closing arguments always result in dueling portraits of a defendant but rarely has a jury been presented as stark a choice as with Blagojevich.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Reid Schar’s voice quaked with indignation as he described Blagojevich as a corrupt officeholder who cravenly pursued campaign money for official acts and then tried to use his power to appoint a replacement for Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate as a golden parachute for himself. Blagojevich apparently believes he is the victim of a massive government effort to frame him, Schar said.
“You are the only ones who can show him the difference between right and wrong,” Schar told the jury. “Your verdict will speak the truth. And the truth is he is guilty.”
Blagojevich’s lawyer, Aaron Goldstein, called the former governor courageous for taking the witness stand to explain what his statements meant on hundreds of secretly made government recordings, Goldstein said.
“Right there is an innocent man,” he said, almost in a shout, as he pointed at Blagojevich. The case was about “nothing, nothing, nothing,” he said, telling jurors that’s what Blagojevich pocketed in all of the so-called schemes with which he was charged.
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In its remarks to jurors, the prosecution and defense agreed on this much: Rod Blagojevich talks too much. But from there, the lawyers parted ways.
“It’s not that he talks too much and it means nothing,” Schar said. “It’s that he talked a lot, and it means everything.”
Prosecutors said Blagojevich was caught on the undercover recordings running his mouth over and over again, telling confidants of his attempts to turn the Senate pick into a high-paying job, a Cabinet post in the Obama administration or $1.5 million in campaign cash. Those words are the crime, they said.
Goldstein, however, said Blagojevich was just babbling his way through “a thought process” on the selection — and nothing more. What investigators captured on tape was the firing synapses of a public official mulling over all kinds of possibilities, with no intent to do anything criminal, he said.
“He likes to talk. That’s all you heard,” Goldstein said. “They want you to believe this talk is a crime. It’s not. He floated ideas, and that’s all it is.”
Blagojevich is charged with 20 criminal counts, including the marquee allegation that he tried to turn his power to pick a new senator into an illicit auction. He is also accused of four other shakedown schemes to pull in campaign funds in exchange for securing a grant for a school, approving tollway expansion, getting more state money to pediatric specialists and signing legislation to aid the horse racing industry.
The jury at his first trial last summer deliberated three weeks before finding him guilty on only one criminal count and deadlocking on the rest, setting the stage for the retrial.
In his presentation, Goldstein stressed that Blagojevich had every right as a politician to raise campaign funds and said none of the episodes in the case saw him move into criminal territory. That view is only challenged by “tainted, compelled and involuntary” government witnesses, including two who were supposed to be shakedown victims but testified under grants of immunity, he said.
Blagojevich testified on his own behalf and explained what was really going on, Goldstein said. “A defendant is not required to prove his innocence or call any witnesses at all. But he did it. He took that walk, and he told you the truth,” he said.
But Schar said that on the stand Blagojevich displayed a very convenient memory.
“He lies over and over again when he thinks it’s in his best interest to do so,” the prosecutor said. The former governor’s defense requires 11 prosecution witnesses to have testified against him falsely under oath, he said.
In addition, the recorded calls from the fall of 2008 are consistent with what government witnesses said, not with the testimony of Blagojevich, Schar argued. “The defendant apparently is framing himself,” he said.
None of the schemes in the case resulted in finished deals, both sides pointed out, but they were split again on what that means.
Prosecutors repeatedly likened the situation to a corrupt police officer who offers to tear up tickets in exchange for a $50 bribe. It doesn’t matter if the motorist says no, they said: just asking is a crime.
Goldstein sought to turn that analogy on its ear.
“They want to give you a hypothetical that’s nowhere near reality,” Goldstein said. “… Not ever does a police officer have the right to ask for money. A politician has the right to ask for campaign contributions.”
Goldstein argued the government’s case was all “sound and fury” and no results. But prosecutors said the reasons for that were twofold: the targets he was trying to squeeze, including Obama, wouldn’t play along; and the Tribune’s publication of a report four days before his arrest that revealed Blagojevich had been secretly recorded as part of a criminal probe.
Even as final arguments proceeded, Blagojevich’s lawyers filed a motion for mistrial complaining of blatant pro-prosecution bias exhibited by presiding Judge James Zagel. They claimed Zagel misled Blagojevich into testifying by saying that was the only way to present some of his evidence to jurors and then, when he got on the stand, restricting what he could say.
Blagojevich, however, long contended he ached to testify and that view didn’t change as he spoke to reporters as he left court Thursday. He said he had waited 21/2 years to defend himself on the stand, though he chose not to do so at his 2010 trial.
He had waited that long listening to “falsehoods, misstatements, conversations twisted out of context … to the very end the government prosecutor twisting my words and twisting the truth,” Blagojevich said.
Now it’s up to the jury to decide whether the defense’s portrayal of the case is the right one or if a guilty Blagojevich didn’t talk his way out of the accusations.
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