A federal judge has turned down a request from impeached former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to have Chicago's top federal prosecutor and his staff thrown off the corruption case against him.
Chief Judge James F. Holderman of U.S. District Court said in an order issued last Friday that "no legal precedent supports the granting of the relief sought by the defendant Blagojevich in this motion." Apparently a prosecutor calling a defendant a lot of names is not as bad as a lawyer calling a judge a few names. Feel me, Sean?
Blagojevich had argued that removing U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald from the case was necessary because the prosecutor made inflammatory remarks about him at a news conference after the then-governor was arrested Dec. 9. Inflammatory is mild. What Fitzgerald said was that Blagojevich had been on "a white-collar crime spree" that would make Abraham Lincoln "roll over in his grave."
When you heard some of the Blagojevich tapes though, you understand Fitz's reaction. But Gerry Spence did a blog piece which I posted when I first inaugurated the blog and I think it is worth looking at again if you never caught it before. Our readership has gone up exponentially in the first two months and many of the earlier pieces I posted many of our new readers have never seen. So here it is again:
http://browardlawblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/guilty-until-proven-innocent.html
Interestingly, the Judge did not totally shut the door on Blagojevich making the same argument again before another jurist. "If an indictment is returned charging defendant Blagojevich with federal, criminal offenses, the district judge to whom the case will be assigned pursuant to the clerk's office random assignment system, will be the appropriate judicial officer to address the matter if raised at that time by the defendant," Holderman wrote. The jurist set an April 7 deadline for the government to obtain an indictment from a grand jury.
Meanwhile, it looks like Blagojevich's fifteen minutes are up. He looked like an absolute fool on the talk show tour, from Jay Leno to The View. His own scandals have been overshadowed by an America facing revelations of new multi million dollar investment frauds every day. And all he tried to sell was a stupid Senate seat. As for the six figure book deal he signed, he could not do that in Florida. You can't profit from your crimes, unless you are an investment counselor on Wall Street. Then you live rich for twenty years and go to jail for forty.
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