“OUT, (#$twING) SPOT! OUT I SAY!”

8/19/10

The Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune this morning reported that some of the jurors in the Blagojevich trial think that Rob Blagojevich, the RodMan’s brother, ought not to be retried. One can easily see the logic behind this belief. The deliberations on the four counts against Rob resulted in much more evenly split decisions than those involving the twenty four counts against his brother, several of which were 11-1 for conviction. Further, Rob Blagojevich had to spend all that time in court, and pay his lawyers for all that time both in and out of court, when only a small portion of the trial concerned him. On many days, Rob’s name never came up, both during the trial and during deliberations. The guy went through a lot for what looks, to the more than casual observer, like some incidents of poor judgment in an otherwise not ignoble attempt to help out his moronic little brother.

This prompted me to resurrect a theory I have long held about this case but have not yet mentioned in this blog, though I have brought it up in private conversations. Perhaps the government indicted Rob Blagojevich in the hopes that Rod would make some sort of deal out of a desire not to put his brother through the rigors of a trial and expose his brother to the very real possibility of jail time. It worked, after all, for Scott Fawell who reached a deal only after the feds came after his girlfriend.

If my theory (again, just a theory) is right, the feds badly misjudged the compassionate or fraternal instincts of Mr. Rod Blagojevich. But, once it became apparent that Rod didn’t hold sufficiently tender feelings for his brother to render Rod amenable to a deal, it would have been difficult, or at least (deservedly) embarrassing, for the government to end its pursuit of Rob.

But…

If my theory (again, just a theory) is true, might not the feds come after Patti Blagojevich in a retrial? Surely, the first phase of the trial produced a lot of smoke about Patti’s career as what looks like a conduit for payoffs to her husband. Might not the feds want to stoke the smoke in an effort to get a jury to find the fire that might be there? No matter what thinks of Rod Blagojevich’s character (quite an oxymoron there, don’t you think?), he cannot be so despicable as to not want to reach some kind of deal to spare his wife and the mother of his children, can he? Would he face some enormous pressure and/or irresistible inducement to reach a deal from quarters other than the federal government? Remember that before Patti was Patti Blagojevich, she was Patti Mell.

Please refer to my post of a few days ago (THE SHOW MUST GO ON!, 8/17/10) when I speak of, inter alia, the scariness of an ambitious prosecutor with the unlimited resources of the federal government behind him. Would going after Patti be considered beyond the pale? One wonders. Going after Patti would necessitate calling Tony Rezko as a witness, but the government appears to be prepared to do that in any case. The only thing that stands in the government’s way, if it wants to use Patti to get to Rod, is its willingness to do so.