After a decade of active duty in the Army, Robert Blagojevich knows the military definition of collateral damage. He may soon personify the legal system’s version, and unfairly so.
“Four months, four felony charges” is how he concisely summarized to me his state of jeopardy created by stepping into the ethical La Brea Tar Pit of his younger brother’s political life.
The four months were in 2008, at the behest of a dying mother’s wishes, assisting as a fund-raiser to a brother with whom relations were and remain strained. The time led to charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit extortion, attempted extortion and conspiracy to commit bribery.
It was coincidental that I watched a State Department briefing on C-Span the other night, with the chief spokesman criticizing leaks of 92,000 pages of classified documents on the Afghanistan war. Robert smiled when I noted how the spokesman had cautioned about putting undue stock in often-uncorroborated “field reports.”
It was akin to a term Robert used when testifying about accusations that he was a middleman for his younger brother, Rod, in corrupt dealings with prospective campaign donors. He defended himself as passing along “field information” on a law firm lobbyist’s annoyance over not getting state bond business.
“Let’s be realistic,” Robert said in a government cross-examination. “In the real world, you’re out there raising money and people come to you.”
In a distinction at the heart of the whole trial, he said that he never mixed fund-raising and state business. Yet he conceded that “sometimes they bleed over,” or unavoidably blend, which is why he is in hot water.
In his fleeting role as a fund-raiser for his brother, then the governor, he testified, it was inevitable that people sought him out for everything from their preference for a new United States senator to getting a nephew’s résumé into the right hands.
Robert, 54, who spent his postmilitary career as a banker and businessman, mostly in Tennessee, is a more mature and centered fellow than his brother and exhibits none of Rod’s Clintonian insecurity, marked by the preening need to please strangers. He’d probably be a poor fund-raiser, given a clear impatience with fools — including his occasionally unresponsive brother, according to testimony — and a limited reservoir of overt insincerity.
The government case turns partly on a wiretapped conversation in which Rod tells Robert to inform a prospective donor, who wants Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr. picked for Barack Obama’s Senate seat, that he must “deliver something tangible up front.” Rod is also heard cautioning Robert to “assume everybody’s listening, the whole world’s listening” prior to the meeting with that donor, which never took place.
When the government pressed Robert on the witness stand, he exhibited the mild peevishness of a self-confident military guy not accustomed to a skeptical grilling. “You’re about to tell me,” he said at one point with a slight sneer at a prosecutor who asked what Robert felt was a rhetorical question.
But it’s clear that Robert deemed absurd the Jesse Jr.-for-Senate notion and didn’t take as credible its proponents’ claims that $6 million would be raised for Rod if “Junior” were picked. Robert called Mr. Jackson’s backers Keystone Kops and their central player a goofball who “was all over the place,” prompting Robert not to pass to his brother all the relevant “field information.”
Robert got caught in a slimy system, aiding a desperate brother in the search for lucre. Even by the government’s version, his allegedly suspect acts on Rod’s behalf pale compared with the heavy lifting of crud by chums already convicted or who testified with immunity.
We spoke about the vast federal wiretaps and my belief that politicians on all levels should knock on wood that the government isn’t listening to them. He told me that there is even a wiretap that catches the sounds of his son’s urinating in a bathroom.
There’s a certain irony in a military veteran — one who ran a platoon overseeing three Pershing nuclear missiles in West Germany during the high-stakes craziness of the cold war — grousing about undue power.
But as the newly released field reports on Afghanistan suggest, even the best-intentioned people can be undermined by a failed mission and untrustworthy allies.
by JAMES WARREN | Jul 29, 2010
After a decade of active duty in the Army, Robert Blagojevich knows the military definition of collateral damage. He may soon personify the legal system’s version, and unfairly so.
“Four months, four felony charges” is how he concisely summarized to me his state of jeopardy created by stepping into the ethical La Brea Tar Pit of his younger brother’s political life.
The four months were in 2008, at the behest of a dying mother’s wishes, assisting as a fund-raiser to a brother with whom relations were and remain strained. The time led to charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit extortion, attempted extortion and conspiracy to commit bribery.
It was coincidental that I watched a State Department briefing on C-Span the other night, with the chief spokesman criticizing leaks of 92,000 pages of classified documents on the Afghanistan war. Robert smiled when I noted how the spokesman had cautioned about putting undue stock in often-uncorroborated “field reports.”
It was akin to a term Robert used when testifying about accusations that he was a middleman for his younger brother, Rod, in corrupt dealings with prospective campaign donors. He defended himself as passing along “field information” on a law firm lobbyist’s annoyance over not getting state bond business.
“Let’s be realistic,” Robert said in a government cross-examination. “In the real world, you’re out there raising money and people come to you.”
In a distinction at the heart of the whole trial, he said that he never mixed fund-raising and state business. Yet he conceded that “sometimes they bleed over,” or unavoidably blend, which is why he is in hot water.
In his fleeting role as a fund-raiser for his brother, then the governor, he testified, it was inevitable that people sought him out for everything from their preference for a new United States senator to getting a nephew’s résumé into the right hands.
Robert, 54, who spent his postmilitary career as a banker and businessman, mostly in Tennessee, is a more mature and centered fellow than his brother and exhibits none of Rod’s Clintonian insecurity, marked by the preening need to please strangers. He’d probably be a poor fund-raiser, given a clear impatience with fools — including his occasionally unresponsive brother, according to testimony — and a limited reservoir of overt insincerity.
The government case turns partly on a wiretapped conversation in which Rod tells Robert to inform a prospective donor, who wants Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr. picked for Barack Obama’s Senate seat, that he must “deliver something tangible up front.” Rod is also heard cautioning Robert to “assume everybody’s listening, the whole world’s listening” prior to the meeting with that donor, which never took place.
When the government pressed Robert on the witness stand, he exhibited the mild peevishness of a self-confident military guy not accustomed to a skeptical grilling. “You’re about to tell me,” he said at one point with a slight sneer at a prosecutor who asked what Robert felt was a rhetorical question.
But it’s clear that Robert deemed absurd the Jesse Jr.-for-Senate notion and didn’t take as credible its proponents’ claims that $6 million would be raised for Rod if “Junior” were picked. Robert called Mr. Jackson’s backers Keystone Kops and their central player a goofball who “was all over the place,” prompting Robert not to pass to his brother all the relevant “field information.”
Robert got caught in a slimy system, aiding a desperate brother in the search for lucre. Even by the government’s version, his allegedly suspect acts on Rod’s behalf pale compared with the heavy lifting of crud by chums already convicted or who testified with immunity.
We spoke about the vast federal wiretaps and my belief that politicians on all levels should knock on wood that the government isn’t listening to them. He told me that there is even a wiretap that catches the sounds of his son’s urinating in a bathroom.
There’s a certain irony in a military veteran — one who ran a platoon overseeing three Pershing nuclear missiles in West Germany during the high-stakes craziness of the cold war — grousing about undue power.
But as the newly released field reports on Afghanistan suggest, even the best-intentioned people can be undermined by a failed mission and untrustworthy allies.