By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com It’s not that Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has to worry about his career. But on Monday, he got some redemption when a federal jury convicted the ever-too chatty ex-Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich on 17 of 20 public corruption charges. It was the second trial. The first had a rather embarrassing outcome….
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Soon we’ll get the verdict in the Blago II trial and we’ll start to evaluate what it means for Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. The jury begins the fifth day of deliberations on Thursday. The first trial did not bode so well for Fitzgerald, the rock star among U.S. Attorneys. The…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com It’s nice to get a courtesy call from time to time. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that’s just what Rahm Emanuel got from Chicago’s U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald the morning that Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested in Dec. 9, 2008. Emanuel had been selected as President-elect Obama’s chief of staff. Sun-Times…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Joseph Evans, regional director for the DEA’s North and Central Americas Region in Mexico City, has been named ticklethewire.com’s Fed Of The Year for 2010. Faced with one of the more daunting tasks in the DEA — battling the violent Mexican Drug Cartels — Evans is credited with developing key partnerships…
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By The Washington Post Editorial Page WASHINGTON — U.S. ATTORNEY Patrick J. Fitzgerald should back off his vow to retry former governor Rod Blagojevich (D-Ill.). With moral thunder in December 2008, the aggressive prosecutor declared that the state’s chief executive was nabbed “in the middle of what we can only describe as a public corruption…
By Allan Lengel For AOL News At first blush, Rod Blagojevich appeared almost Houdini-like, slipping out from under a weight of charges that seemed almost certain to bury the former Illinois governor. A federal jury in downtown Chicago convicted him Tuesday on only one of 24 corruption counts — one that involved lying to FBI…
By Allan Lengel For AOL News When he announced the charges in late 2008, Chicago’s U.S. attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, came at Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich with all the bravado of Eliot Ness going after Al Capone in the movie “The Untouchables.” He told a throng of reporters that Blagojevich had embarked on a “corruption crime…
