Golden (75 page)

For a second trial, prosecutors thought they could make the case more direct. The strategy became to present what Blagojevich had done, play the tapes, underscore specific fraud counts, and ask for a conviction.

Blagojevich, meanwhile, was keeping a lower profile than he had the first time around. He would occasionally pop up on a talk show or pistachio commercial. As the second trial neared, he invited a few reporters into his tidy brick home to complain about his treatment and admit that he really was fearful of what could happen to him.

He allowed two
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reporters in on the same day a second pool of 150 possible jurors arrived at the Dirksen courthouse to fill out questionnaires and begin the process of selecting a panel to hear his retrial. It was April 20, 2011, some eight months after the first jury had ended its work mostly deadlocked. The TV news trucks were back idling on the family's street by then, with cameramen standing around hoping to get some quick B-roll of Blagojevich coming or going. Patti opened the front door for the
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reporters and quickly complained about the media. She basically woke up when they pulled up out front for the morning broadcasts, sometimes before 5:00 A
M,
she said, adding that she felt the worst for her neighbors, who had done nothing to bring the media scourge upon them.

After offering something to drink, Patti showed the way to her husband's office. He appeared looking every bit like a politician dressed to do a fireside chat, wearing neat jeans and a collared shirt under a blue V-neck
sweater. He shook hands warmly and made sure his interviewers were comfortable.

Right off the bat, the ex-governor said he had mixed emotions about having to go through a trial again, especially, he said, when he was falsely accused. He hadn't put on a defense, and he insisted the government had failed to prove the allegations it had so dramatically leveled against him more than two years earlier at Fitzgerald's fiery press conference. He wouldn't wish what he was going through on anyone, Blagojevich said.

“I will make a confession here: there's some trepidation,” he said. “There's fear of course when you have to face something like this.”

Blagojevich moved through the talking points he had used with other reporters, about being profoundly amazed at having to face another jury and being unable to sleep late at night when there were still hours to go before dawn. The mind races and fears creep in, Blagojevich said, the biggest one being that he would not be around to protect his two daughters and watch them grow up. He might wind up unable to work and make a better life for the girls. But at the same time, he said, he was eager to get things going again, sounding much more like a man who planned to defend himself by not only calling witnesses but also speaking directly to the jury. He hadn't gotten any of the vindication he believed he deserved, he said, as the family dog, Skittles, ran around his legs.

“I'll never give this up, because they're lying about me,” he said, his back stiffening. “I'm an innocent man with honest intentions, who … was trying to end up in the right place on the decision with regard to the US Senate seat. And those other allegations are just trumped-up lies.”

The investigation of him had always been on his mind, Blagojevich said. Word had been spreading in the fall of 2008 that the feds were stepping up their pursuit of him. Rezko had changed his mind and begun helping prosecutors. New subpoenas were flying to people who were close to him. His own lawyers, including Bill Quinlan, had told him that defense attorneys representing others in Blagojevich's circle were telling him they had never seen the US attorney's office so determined to get someone.

So why be on any phone talking about anything that federal investigators might, according to Blagojevich, “misinterpret?” As was his way, Blagojevich turned that question on its head.

“That's why you have five hundred hours of telephone conversations with me,” he said. “Just the opposite in fact was the case. You have all these conversations and this talk in large part because … I want to be sure that whatever
I do, whatever I think about doing, whatever other people have suggested I think about doing, that I talk about them over and over and over again. With my legal counsel Bill Quinlan; with my chief of staff John Harris, who was a former prosecutor in the military; with my deputy governor Greenlee, who was a federal judge's law clerk; with my political consultants, who are world-class Washington, DC-based political consultants who do presidential races.”

Blagojevich hinted strongly that he would take the stand the second time around and defend himself. He suggested he was not above calling a number of politicians to the stand to talk about their dealings with him. He was going to be aggressive and was determined to win, though he had been preparing his family for any result.

Patti didn't like it when he told this story, Blagojevich said, but he had told his daughters everything would be OK, one way or another. He had said something to his daughters. “I said something like, ‘Worst-case scenario— which I don't expect will happen—you can get another dog and call him Daddy,'” he said.

The second trial in the summer of 2011 lacked some of the buzz of the first, but “Blagojevich 2.0” still brought crowds to the Dirksen courthouse. And it was quickly evident during jury selection that the pool of people who would hear the case was even more saturated with Blagojevich coverage and TV appearances than the first group had been. One man had downloaded a government recording of Blagojevich blowing his stack and swearing as the ringtone for his cell phone. Others used words like
nutcase
to describe him.

“If you take that literally, it does not mean ‘guilty,'” Zagel argued to keep the jury pool larger, possibly only half joking.

There was an art teacher, a doctor, and a truck driver for the city. One woman said she was president of a suburban school board, and Zagel asked if she could set aside what she had heard about Blagojevich and reach a verdict based just on evidence in court. “I've been working on that mentally ever since I got the summons,” she answered.

Much of the media coverage of the second jury's selection seemed to revolve around a woman who asked out of jury duty because she had tickets to
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Oprah, who had not been named to the US Senate in 2008 after all, was still doing her show in Chicago. The woman was eventually let go.

Blagojevich seemed fairly relaxed as the second panel came together. In the hall outside Zagel's room one day, he ran into none other than Matsumoto, the foreman of the first jury, who planned to watch much of the second trial, feeling as if he had unfinished business with the case. Blagojevich spotted him and quickly walked up to shake his hand.

“I'm glad you're not on this one,” he said.

The lawyers eventually whittled their way through a group with clear feelings against the former governor, before settling on a group of eleven women and only one man.

For their case, prosecutors would switch up their order of delivery, starting the second time with Niewoehner, who said Illinoisans had trusted Blagojevich by electing him twice.

“And he sold out that trust,” Niewoehner said, speaking in a loud, earnest voice, pacing before the jury. Blagojevich stared at the prosecutor as he pointed in Blagojevich's direction.

As they had during their opening statement at the first trial, prosecutors said Blagojevich in 2008 viewed Barack Obama's election to the presidency—and Blagojevich's ability to appoint someone to the US Senate to replace Obama—as his ticket to getting out of the financial difficulties he was sinking into that year. Blagojevich tried to use his ability to name a senator to get a post in the new administration or to get campaign cash, Niewoehner said. The power he had was corrupted for his own benefit and to help him get out of debt, he said.

“He decided to sell the US Senate seat to solve his problem” by making criminal demands, the prosecutor said.

His opening statement was something like “Blagojevich for Dummies” as Niewoehner used an overhead to boil the case down to just five specific crimes. And each was much more focused than in the first trial. Instead of building a pyramid with “the Blagojevich Enterprise” at its base, prosecutors presented narrow episodes of what had happened in the fall of 2008.

On the Senate seat, Blagojevich first wanted a cabinet post in exchange for naming Jarrett and let an intermediary know.

“And right there, the crime is complete,” said Niewoehner, emphasizing that just asking was wrong. The prosecutor made similar small-bore statements about the attempts against Magoon, Krozel, and Johnston and
about Blagojevich's alleged attempt to get a fundraiser to help a North Side school on Emanuel's behalf.

“Right there, when the defendant ordered that demand to be sent, the crime was committed,” Niewoehner said again.

There was no mention of any alleged crime taking place before 2006, as prosecutors focused on the fall of 2008. Much of Operation Board Games was being left on the table in a further attempt at simplicity. Also pared down was the allegation that Blagojevich had tried to extort the
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and force the firing of editorial board members.

With Adam Jr. not in court, the opening defense statement was left to attorney Aaron Goldstein, who had been part of the first trial but more of a sideline player. Still, Blagojevich had great faith in him, in part because he tapped into Blagojevich's natural love of the underdog. The prosecution of Rod Blagojevich is “a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” Goldstein said, sometimes channeling Adam Jr. by raising and lowering his voice. “Do you think they found a big bag of cash hidden somewhere?” he said. “No, they found nothing, because in fact there is nothing.”

The defense flashed images of Blagojevich on an overhead screen, including one of a young Blagojevich with his parents and one of Monk at his wedding. Monk betrayed his friend, Goldstein stressed. And as for other men in the case who portrayed themselves as victims, they were millionaires and not victims at all. That group included leaders of horse tracks who stood to make money from casinos if Blagojevich signed a bill authorizing them. The supposed victims didn't come to any understanding that they were being shaken down “until they come a-knockin',” Goldstein said, meaning the feds.

Blagojevich simply listened to overtures about the Senate seat, Goldstein said, including from Obama. He wasn't extorting or bribing anyone, the lawyer told the jury. Blagojevich was thinking about his own future, even thinking out loud about naming himself to the seat. “He was talking about his dreams,” he said.

Harris was back as an early witness in round two, as the government reshuffled the deck in an attempt to hit the Senate seat hard, early, and often.
Tribune
reporter Bob Secter blogged for the paper that it was like the Ultra Slim-Fast version of the Blagojevich case. Harris was going over testimony that the first
jury hadn't heard until week four of the first trial, and he completely skipped over his testimony on Patti trying to get jobs with Blagojevich's influence.