Golden (84 page)

And Blagojevich remembered the response. It hadn't been the one he wanted to hear, and he remembered Balanoff looking embarrassed when he answered that something like that just wasn't going to happen. It was so bad, Blagojevich said, he felt bad for how uncomfortable Balanoff looked. They kept talking, with Blagojevich mentioning the Rezko problem and saying he understood what everything looked like from Obama's perspective.

But Blagojevich said it didn't really matter. What he wanted the jury to know now was that it was just something he tossed into the air. He was absolutely not “conditioning one for the other.” He hadn't decided what to do. Blagojevich said he was in no way conveying a promise to Balanoff that he was not prepared to fulfill if Balanoff's reaction had been the opposite of the one Blagojevich had gotten.

It was a “no,” but not one that was fatal to Blagojevich then.

“The rejection of the idea. I was nowhere close to any decision, even if they said yes on Health and Human Services, whether that's what I really wanted to do,” Blagojevich said. “I didn't know.”

The meeting had wrapped up, and Blagojevich insisted he moved on. He talked to Greenlee about ways to move ahead on the capital bill and ways to negotiate with Madigan.

A call with Scofield was among the next calls Goldstein asked about. Blagojevich could be heard telling him he thought Jarrett was probably out there somewhere, knowing that she could have her coveted seat in the Senate if Blagojevich could be made happy in some way. She had a path to her dream, and it went through Blagojevich. Jarrett had a lot of influence on Obama, Blagojevich recalled saying during the call. Cabinet positions were being filled, and maybe it would all come together. Jarrett was holding the keys to what Blagojevich wanted, and vice versa.

“She's holding hers with two hands, just kinda clinging to, you know, little pieces of it. Me, I've got the whole thing wrapped around my arms, mine, OK?” Blagojevich had said on the call.

So what about that?

“It's a clumsy way of trying to be literary,” Blagojevich told the jury. It sounded stupid then and it was stupid now, he admitted. Like so much else, it was being placed under the umbrella of Blagojevich thinking out loud and not thinking for very long before ideas came flying out of his mouth.

Maybe Blagojevich could at least see himself become ambassador to Macedonia, he had joked on the recording. Maybe that's all Obama and his advisers thought he was worthy of anyway.

“Another stupid idea that was going nowhere,” Blagojevich testified. “And Macedonia is great. I'm not here to say anything bad about Macedonians,” he went on. “The home of Alexander the Great, anyway.”

From there, Blagojevich's testimony was about what the endgame had been that December.

The governor had gone into the month with seemingly no clear direction, though he believed a final plan was forming. One minute he appeared to be plotting a deft political maneuver to draw Washington leaders into his Illinois fight, and the next he once again seemed to be a man lost in the woods and shooting at anything that moved. Like the time he joked about sending himself to the Senate and going to Afghanistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden. Blagojevich told Goldstein he had said something like that as Schar objected yet again.

Before Blagojevich could be turned over to Schar to face cross-examination, Goldstein had to cover the allegation that Blagojevich seriously considered appointing Jesse Jackson Jr. in exchange for $1.5 million. It was a charge of a spectacular, flat-out sale of a powerful government post and an affront to democracy itself. Prosecutors believed the late calls in the case showed that when push came to shove, that was a likely outcome if Blagojevich could line up everything just as he wanted before Christmas 2008.

Blagojevich's position was that he was floating the idea of the Jackson pick, knowing that leading senators and Obama wouldn't want Jackson anywhere near the capitol, so he could “incentivize” Democratic leadership to push Michael Madigan to give Blagojevich what he wanted legislatively in Illinois. Blagojevich hoped the jury could see the chess move and that the tapes would sound like that was what he was really doing. The Washington establishment wanted a senator who could be reelected, not a thorn like Jackson, who was controversial.

Among the conversations Blagojevich wanted the jury to hear was one with Senator Bob Menendez, who was leading the Democratic committee that steered the national effort to push certain candidates and unify party
strategy. Menendez had said his interest was seeing someone appointed who could win again in two years and who wouldn't need a lot of involvement from the national party to raise money. Blagojevich said he explained where he was with Madigan and that he could use help getting a deal going. “He said they generally don't get involved in local fights, but this would be an important one,” Blagojevich said. Menendez had told him the party might be able to get behind that kind of arrangement, Blagojevich said, telling the jury that Rahm Emanuel emerged as the go-between who would speak to Madigan.

But there were problem calls during this time period as well.

One of the worst was December 4, when Blagojevich had been on the phone with his Washington adviser, Fred Yang, and Greenlee. He had been recorded telling them about the idea of a Jackson choice, and it certainly sounded real.

He was thinking about the possibility of that pick, he told the pair. There was “tangible support” available to him if he went that direction, he said on the call. So, what about that?

Blagojevich testified that he knew there was an offer of $1.5 million behind the Jackson push and that the congressman himself could even be behind it. But on the call the jury had heard, Blagojevich said he was only talking about political support and that it didn't matter because it was all just a ruse anyway.

Jurors could see that, Blagojevich said, because of the call that came next. He was on the phone with Greenlee again, trying to explain what had just happened on the call with Yang. The talk about Jackson was just that, and he was strengthening his bargaining position. Yang was in Washington and could help spread a perceived message that the Jackson scenario was real.

Goldstein pointed to one part of the call with Greenlee in particular.

“It's a repugnant idea, but I need to leverage that Jesse Jr. with these fucking national people,” Blagojevich said on the call. The jury should know that was the real reality, Blagojevich testified. He was trying to explain to Greenlee what he was
really
doing.

“He wasn't picking up on it,” Blagojevich testified. “I had no intention of making Jesse Jackson Jr. senator.”

When Greenlee had testified, he said he simply hadn't believed his boss and thought Blagojevich was just placating him. To Greenlee, it was much more realistic that Blagojevich was being honest with Yang, whom he had
known for much longer, than with him. Greenlee thought “tangible support” was campaign cash, and he said he thought there was a very good chance Blagojevich wanted it and would be willing to sell the seat.

And there were calls from that day where Blagojevich had less room to try to explain himself.

In one of the most damaging, Blagojevich had told his brother that he was considering “elevating” Jackson to the vacancy. Jackson's camp had made promises to him, but “some of the stuff's gotta start happening now.”

Blagojevich didn't explain why he would have been saying that to his brother if the pick wasn't a real option, and his explanations fell flatter in the room than some of his earlier ones. He said when he told Robert that things would have to start happening if Jackson were to be picked, he said he meant political support. Jackson would have to start appearing with him and stirring his supporters and backers on the South Side to get behind Blagojevich's political agenda.

Robert was to go and meet with Raghu Nayak, a man that both brothers knew had made the offer of campaign cash. Rod told his brother to be careful how everything was expressed.

“And assume everybody's listening, the whole world is listening,” Blagojevich had said on the call, obviously completely clueless to the fact that, oh yes, someone was in fact listening.

Goldstein asked Blagojevich to explain that, and Blagojevich tried his best. In the political arena, when you have conversations like that, keep a clear conscience.

“You don't mind saying it on national television, that's what that phrase means,” he told the jury.

Likewise, he had an explanation for why he told his brother not to have his conversation with Nayak on a telephone. Because there had been the money offer at an earlier point, the conversation needed to be crystal clear and not hindered by any language barrier, Blagojevich said. The fine details were going to be key.

“I did not want any miscommunication problem on what we were doing,” Blagojevich said. “I wanted him to do it in person so he could properly explain whatever idea I was trying to do here.”

Of course the meeting had not happened anyway, with Blagojevich pulling the plug after the
Tribune
reported the next day, December 5, 2008, that the federal investigation of him had led to recordings of his conversations being made. That was a “crisis,” he said, and because he wouldn't have time
to tell his brother exactly what to say in a Nayak meeting, he had thought better of it and had Robert just cancel.

If the jury thought all of that was a little thick, the Blagojevich defense sought to cover it by playing another call that they hoped would again show the governor's true intention. It was from a few days later, on December 8, with Harris telling Blagojevich about talking to Emanuel again about the Senate choice. Emanuel had not been thrilled at the possibility of a Jackson appointment, which Blagojevich said he took as a signal that his overall strategy could be working. Harris had recounted how Emanuel threw out names like Cheryle Jackson, the former Blagojevich aide, seemingly trying to spur the governor in a different direction. The call with Harris had ended with Blagojevich encouraged. He thought Rahm would be his broker, a powerful hand coming in to sway Michael Madigan.

“I went to bed that night thinking I was a day or two away from making that Madigan deal,” he told the jury, almost sounding wistful. Rahm, Harry Reid, Menendez, and Dick Durbin seemed to be getting behind him, he said, “converging and descending” on Madigan to make the deal happen.

In all, he had considered some thirty-four people for the seat. The options had ranged from the politically wise to the ridiculous to some that crossed ethical and criminal lines. What the jury had were scores of recordings of Blagojevich talking about what he wanted to do and days of testimony where he said he was explaining to them what he was really doing. It might be up to history to decide whether Blagojevich was actually planning to do one thing or the other in December 2008 or whether he was really pushing to make all of the options available to him before deciding at the very end which way he would go. But the jury would decide whether Blagojevich headed off to a federal prison, and he wanted to tell them one more time that there was something they could believe.

He hadn't knowingly done anything illegal or shaken anyone down for a seat in the United States Senate, the most exclusive club on earth.

“No,” Blagojevich said when Goldstein again asked him if that's what he had done.

“Absolutely not.”

It was 4:00 P
M
on June 2, 2009, with just about an hour left in the court day, when Schar finally got to rise from the prosecution table.

He walked around the back of it toward an evidence cart that was pushed up against the jury box. It was from that location that the government typically questioned witnesses at the trial, and Schar was standing there now. He was directly opposite Blagojevich in the room, probably twenty feet away, and closer to the jury than Blagojevich was on the witness stand.

After all the years of government pursuit, all of the press conferences where Blagojevich swore prosecutors were on a witch hunt, all of the TV shenanigans, all of the artful dodging in public, and all of the Blagojevich-ian head fakes, it was one assistant US attorney versus Illinois's most infamous former governor. George Ryan's conviction had come six years earlier in a courtroom a few floors down from where Schar and Blagojevich were about to square off, but Ryan had not testified in his own defense.