By Steve Rhodes
Sam Adam Jr. and his mentally ill client reached out to the jury through the media again on Wednesday, hoping to God the panel is disobeying the rules and watching TV coverage of the case that is now in their hands.
Adam broke down in tears describing how Rod Blagojevich’s All Kids program saved his premature child’s life. Apparently Adam, one of the city’s elite defense attorneys in business with his father, another of the city’s elite defense attorneys, was broke and without health insurance just four years ago.
Without All Kids, Adam told a media throng on the day the case went to the jury, doctors “would’ve probably recommended an abortion,” Adam said.
What?
Adam says he decided to finally reveal this now because “I didn’t want somebody saying early on that was the reason why I told you in when this case first started that I loved that man.”
Adam apparently isn’t concerned, though, that somebody might question the veracity of his story by revealing it now instead of, say, after a verdict is rendered.
Blagojevich, too, tried to reach the jury one more time through their TV sets.
See, he and Patti have this faith, and it’s bleepin’ golden.
Plus, it makes them feel really good that they gave those free rides to seniors. Please return the favor.
Trying to reach the jury is really what Adam’s show about going to jail was all about, too. He wants to plant the notion in jurors’ minds that there is some nefarious reason why the government didn’t call Tony Rezko and Stuart Levine to the stand. Judge James Zagel had previously ruled that Adam could do no such thing, but without the melodrama that Adam used to make it the story of the day.
Nothing prevented Adam from putting Rezko and Levine on the stand himself, except the knowledge that each would provide testimony deadly to the defense. The last thing Adam wanted was to see Rezko and Levine on the stand describing the way they schemed with his client.
Fortunately for the defense, the prosecution wasn’t too keen on putting either of them on the stand either.
Rezko has reportedly cooperated to a degree with prosecutors, but once claimed that he was being asked to say things that weren’t true. Adam would’ve been all over that on cross-examination. When you have relatively pristine witnesses such as the Blago inner circle, why raise the specter of a taint if you are winning your case? Jurors may think they all told lies to get better deals, though that argument almost always fails – absent a Rezko.
On the other hand, defense didn’t want to call him because one jury has already found him guilty of corruption and he would damage Blago by implicating him in his schemes.
As for Levine, the prosecution didn’t want to put an allegedly drug-addled liar with shaky credibility on the stand if it didn’t need to. And the defense didn’t want, like Rezko, a guy convicted of corruption implicating their client in his schemes.
What the defense wanted was for the prosecution to leave Rezko and Levine on the sidelines so they they wouldn’t have to rebut their testimony but could complain that they weren’t called to testify, hoping they could sow doubt of some sort into the minds of jurors that prosecutors avoided putting two big fish on the stand because their case would fall apart.
As if.
Also missing and nearly forgotten: The late Chris Kelly. Kelly and Rezko were the real inner circle, the other two legs to Blagojevich’s ruling triumvirate.
Remember: Rather than cooling it when the feds closed in on Kelly and Rezko and they were no longer, um, in a position to help, Blagojevich brought in his brother.
Some members of the media have expressed sympathy for Robert Blagojevich, as if he is a naif who got caught up in brotherly love. As Adam might say, gimme a break.
Robert, at the least, allowed himself to be corrupted – and by a brother he hated. Why? It wasn’t out of a commitment to public service, that’s for sure. Robert is a staunch Republican more aligned with Bill Brady than his nominally Democratic sibling.
Robert reportedly came to his brother’s side out of loyalty to their late mother. But we didn’t elect their mother, nor were the interests of the Blagojevich family more important than the public interest.
For that matter, neither is Sam Adam’s law career.
LiLo vs. Blago
Compare and contrast.
Hyena vs. Lions
“Governors are fall guys,” John Kass writes. “But until Madigan and Daley go away, there can’t be any real change in the politics of Illinois. It’ll still be tribal, run by warlords.”
Real Change
“Are we ready for a third-party governor?” Kristen McQueary writes. “You bet your frustrated, disenfranchised, two-party system-fatigued tush, we are.”
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Contrast!
Posted on July 29, 2010