When the fat lady sings, there are advantages to watching through the wrong end of the opera glasses. Up close, the Blagojevich scandal is almost overwhelming. The FBI cuffed the governor at the crack of dawn on December 9, and a few hours later U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald accused him of a “political corruption crime spree.” The media reacted to Fitzgerald’s news conference like a football team given a pregame pep talk for the ages—reporters charged into the streets ready to rock ‘n’ roll.
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“Mind-boggling,” wrote Scott Turow, author and former prosecutor, the morning after the Blago eruption. Turow is Chicago’s own but his forum was the Times, and his unboggled mind was narrowly focused on Fitzgerald’s case. He found matters “worrisome”—but not because Illinois was being led by a man whose culpability was being taken for granted and whose sanity was being openly debated. What worried Turow was that the governor’s “shameless behavior seems to have put [Fitzgerald] into the unenviable position of having to bring a case before he was ready.”
Turow seemed to have listened a little more carefully and reacted a little more deliberately to what Fitzgerald had to say. He wrote that Fitzgerald normally shows an “almost obsessive desire” to nail down his evidence before returning charges and a considerable reluctance to interfere with the workings of government. For example: Fitzgerald had withheld the indictment of former governor George Ryan until Ryan left office. And Fitzgerald indicated at his news conference that he’d originally intended to indict Blagojevich next spring, by which time the Obama administration already would have decided whether it wanted Fitzgerald to stay on as U.S. attorney.
We might see the idea suggested by the Times op-eds—that Fitzgerald compromised his own prosecution to sound an alarm—as the path not taken by the hordes of local reporters much less interested in legal nuance than political drama. But Cam Simpson, a former Tribune reporter working for the Wall Street Journal, followed the path to an intriguing conclusion. In a piece the paper published on Monday, he wrote that the case against Blagojevich was compromised not by Fitzgerald but by the Tribune, with its December 5 front-page story “Trib exclusive: Feds taped Blagojevich.” This was “according to people close to the investigation and a careful reading of the FBI’s affidavit in the case.”
A political scandal in which a sitting governor is accused of trying to sell off the Senate seat just vacated by the president-elect and squeeze the local media baron into firing his editorial board sounds like a story that already has everything it needs. But a femme fatale never hurts.
How much did it add to St. Clair’s story? Consider, for comparison’s sake, this hapless attempt by somebody else to render the governor’s wife: “And you can’t leave out the supporting cast. Mrs. Blago curses like the inmate working the cafeteria at a women’s prison who replies with an f-bomb to anyone objecting to a leaden ladle-thwack of unidentifiable green mush on their lunch tray.”
