Golden (79 page)

Emanuel stepped from the witness stand in less than five minutes and walked right back out of the courtroom. He left from a parking lot underneath the courthouse so he didn't have to pass through the lobby where a bank of news cameras was in place that might have captured shots for the evening news. It was only later that Emanuel had spoken dismissively of finally making an appearance at the Blagojevich trial. It had taken longer for him to get there from city hall a few blocks away, he said, than it had for him to testify.

If Blagojevich really was “running for innocent,” as reporters liked to joke, he was about to give the campaign speech of his life. Many thought as soon as he was charged he was destined to take things on himself. There was little chance he wouldn't eventually get up from a defense table, straighten his suit jacket, give Patti a peck on the cheek, and walk up to the witness stand to try to talk his way out of it.

As he stood and glanced over the room, he appeared to make eye contact with a few people, giving sharp nods of his head like a politician giving last-second greetings to people he knew before a speech and making it look like the room was his.

The idea of Blagojevich not trying to explain to a jury what he was doing on all of those wiretaps was so contrary to his personality, it was almost unthinkable. Blagojevich not testifying was like a trained greyhound deciding not to chase a lure or a great actor passing on a chance to perform. It was in his nature to take the stand, to speak his mind. Blagojevich had spent months leading up to his first trial promising to do it, which only added to the surprise when he had passed on the chance to talk to the 2010 jury. He had taken the advice of his lawyers during round one, had stayed silent, and later thought it was a big mistake.

Many thought that Blagojevich was driven to the witness stand during the second trial by Judge Zagel, and in many ways he was. During the first trial, Zagel had given the defense more leeway, beliving Schar would get
to clean it all up during a cross-examination of the ex-governor, which of course never occurred. So because of the switcheroo the first time, Zagel had kept a much tighter leash on Blagojevich and his lawyers during the second trial, effectively increasing Blagojevich's need to testify. Many of the explanations that Blagojevich wanted to give were only going to come from him. But the truth of the matter is, very little of that meant anything to Blagojevich by 2011. The look on his face when asked if he would testify at the second trial made it obvious: his eyes would narrow slightly, his jaw would clench, and he would nod his head, even while saying he wouldn't make any promises.

When he finally did walk to the front of the courtroom, he had a head bob for the jury, too, and then another to the court security officer standing near the witness stand. There was no hesitation when he turned to the judge and raised his right hand. He sat and looked forward determinedly, seated upright with his hands in front of him as if it were a debate and the format called for him to be seated at a table with his opponents. He told the jury his name, that he used to be their governor, and that he was there that day to tell them the truth.

There were many benefits to Blagojevich testifying on his own behalf, despite the risk of opening himself up to cross-examination. First, to the defense, the case was really about intent. His lawyers wanted the jury to think Blagojevich had never really meant to cross any legal lines, even if by listening to the tapes they thought he had. Maybe they could forgive any accidental transgression, if they got to know Blagojevich. His version of the case was that he could barely control his mouth, from his free-flowing profanity to discussions of what to do with a US Senate seat. Blagojevich claimed his idea of a strategy session was to throw out any and every thought that entered his head and then sift through dozens of them to find a good one, like some kind of prospector panning for mental gold. What better way to demonstrate that than having Blagojevich babble on right there in court?

And of course the other benefit was that after meeting and hearing Blagojevich and spending time with him, most people tended to find themselves liking him even if they didn't want to. He was so goofy and seemingly loopy, many people found him to be an engaging guy who probably would be pretty fun to hit a bar with or sit next to at a ballgame. There could be no harm in having jurors thinking, “This sort of crazy guy with the hair who's spouting poetry and historical facts is the criminal mastermind we've been hearing about for weeks?”

So Blagojevich's last attempt to show that he wasn't a devious cheat who had brought the Illinois governor's office to new levels of corruption began with his life story. There was the growing up in Chicago and the little league baseball. There was the remembering of long ago jobs and school days, the struggles and the meeting of the love of his life. As with anyone else, there were failures and victories, partings and meetings, setbacks and the strength to keep going. Blagojevich had gone from shoeshine boy to governor of Illinois. One of his loves and great fixations was US history, and he had longed to see his story end with him as the kind of figure that others might study. He did believe that anyone in America could be president, up to and including Serbian kids from Chicago's Northwest Side who like Elvis and memorize encyclopedias.

“You know, you hear these tapes and these conversations—and I'll have a chance to talk about a lot of them and talk about some of the tremendous flaws I have—I think a lot of some of what I am is, deep down there are certain insecurities,” Blagojevich told them earnestly. “And one of them was, and is I think, it's an insecurity that can drive you to work hard and try to make yourself better, but it's also an insecurity that, you know, kind of have petty sides to it and flaws and fear.”

It might have been one of the most truthful things Blagojevich would say in more than a week of testimony, but the statement didn't hang in the air long before Aaron Goldstein used it as a bridge for Blagojevich to address one thing that might have been on the minds of some jurors when the tapes were brought up. Blagojevich's blue language was memorable, and there was a church choir director on the jury, for crying out loud, and ten other women who Blagojevich probably would never have dreamed of cussing in front of. Did Blagojevich always talk like that? Goldstein asked, setting up Blagojevich to say he was sorry.

“You know, Aaron, this morning as I was leaving, my daughter—my daughter is Amy and my little one Annie—and they were leaving for school, and I asked them, ‘Now kiss your daddy,'” Blagojevich answered. “I told my older one, a teenager, ‘Give daddy a kiss for good luck. I'm going to get on the stand and testify, begin to set the record straight,' and my teenager Amy said, ‘Dad, I'm to blow you a kiss ‘cause I got lip gloss on.' I said OK, so she blew me a kiss and she said, ‘Good luck. Watch your language.'”

He had said he was sorry before in front of news cameras, Blagojevich said, but he wanted to personally apologize to the jury. “When I hear myself on the tapes swearing like that, I'm an f'ing jerk, and I apologize,” he said.

There was clearly a collection of talking points Blagojevich wanted to make, and Goldstein was trying to get to many without his questioning seeming forced or stilted. Occasionally things sounded a bit scripted, such as when Goldstein joked about Blagojevich failing drafting in high school and later sending a law school application to Harvard, of all places.

But most of the time, a door would open slightly, and Blagojevich would plow forward into something he wanted the jury to know, chiefly that he liked to talk, just in case they were missing that. In addition to being R-rated, the tapes showed that incessant talking was his management style.

“I've used these examples—sometimes the press goes out and says I compare myself to Winston Churchill or Gandhi or somebody like that. I'm not doing that,” he started. “But those are historical figures who I have great admiration for, and you can, I believe, draw life lessons from their lives, their struggles, how they dealt with adversities, the things, the principles, the purposes that they committed their lives to. And Churchill had a way of governing that I was always moved by, and that was he would constantly throw out ideas, and one of his adjutant generals or commanders would say, you know, Winston has ten ideas every day and one of ‘em is good.”

And there it was in a nutshell. The Blagojevich defense, wrapped in freedom of speech and the idea that Winston Churchill could have fallen into the same historical trap he did if the circumstances were the same. Blagojevich obviously couldn't argue that it wasn't him on the tapes or even that what he was saying was being misconstrued. What he was saying was fairly clear, so he needed to adopt the words as his own while at the same time decriminalizing them. What good leaders do, he said, is look at any available option, no matter how outlandish, and whittle the pile of choices down into a manageable list of real options.

“Abraham Lincoln would read out loud because he wanted to hear himself and he wanted to hear himself think,” Blagojevich testified.

And just below the surface of the direct argument was something both Blagojevich defenses had tried to hint at throughout. Unable to argue it directly, Blagojevich hoped the jury had picked up the idea that many of the men he was bouncing his ideas off were attorneys who might have warned him to stop if some of his wildest ideas could land him in prison. There was more than one way that the jury could come around to thinking Blagojevich shouldn't face a criminal conviction for just talking.

Another thing he wanted the jury to know was that he had trusted Lon Monk. He had told the jury about loving Monk for sticking by him during
his law school struggles. He had described getting Monk's advice when he wanted to ask Patti to marry him and then having Monk stand up at his wedding and read the Twenty-third Psalm. Monk was one of his closest confidants, and when he had taken money from Rezko and gotten himself in some hot water, he had turned on Blagojevich, who didn't know about the payoff. This would place an unfair betrayal at the root of the government's case against him.

And still another idea he wanted jurors to get was that while he had worked as an attorney, he was by no means overly familiar with the law. He wanted the jury to think that independent of the warnings from lawyers that never came, he was unsure whether what he was doing was right or wrong.

“I never, ever took a federal case. I never had a federal case. I never even got close to a federal case or never felt I was capable or competent, remotely, to handle a federal case. I stayed in the state courts,” he said.

“Never handled a federal criminal case here?” Goldstein asked. Nope.

The former governor of Illinois, former congressman, and former prosecutor and defense lawyer was a legal field mouse. Clueless in the ways of the law and apparently surrounded by muted attorneys, Blagojevich had taken to his normal habit of spouting off every possibility for political moves such as deciding whom to appoint to the US Senate. Federal agents had taped him in an inopportune moment when he was stumbling through some of those thoughts out loud. It was a position that would seemingly apply to whatever tape Blagojevich wanted to go over on the stand, but it didn't stop him from going through many and layering even more explanations atop his overarching view of the evidence. Even though he thought much of what the jury had heard was just talk, he went through each scenario the government had presented to make specific denials. It was a tricky rope to walk because, in a way, Blagojevich was undercutting himself by explaining too much. It was like he wanted the jury to know that he didn't think he was doing anything wrong, but in case they disagreed, he had explanations for each episode to fall back on.

He would start with the 2006 school grant involving Rahm Emanuel, whom he remembered meeting in 1996 in Washington. Blagojevich was a Democratic candidate for Congress, so he had taken a trip to visit the powers that be. Emanuel was then in the Clinton White House and had shown Blagojevich the Oval Office. It was smaller in person than it is on television, Blagojevich told the jury.

Once Blagojevich became governor, Emanuel took over for him in the US House representing the Fifth Congressional District and had remained a political ally. It was a link that would develop over time, and, like many political relationships, it had its ebbs and flows. But at any rate, the Blagojevich defense contended, they were never enemies, and Emanuel wasn't someone that the Illinois governor would have gone out of his way to cross and squeeze for campaign money. Blagojevich claimed to have only a vague memory of Emanuel asking him for the school grant at all during his first term. He did remember the request itself but said at the time he didn't even pay close attention to which school it was for. The approval was basically reflexive. The school—whichever one it was—was in the Fifth Congressional District, and Emanuel had wanted it, and Blagojevich was eager to help. He said his memory was that he had simply directed some staffer to find whatever money it was that the congressman wanted and make it happen.