Public Official A

[legion]

http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2008/02/26/news/doc47c3bd68391de396963804.txt

Any thin veil still hiding the identity of the person prosecutors in the Antoin “Tony” Rezko political corruption case call “Public Official A” was abruptly ripped away Monday — by a federal judge.

Judge Amy J. St. Eve revealed that Public Official A — described by federal prosecutors for months as tangled in political corruption — is Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

She said that Rezko, one of the governor’s key campaign fundraisers, schemed along with millionaire attorney Stuart Levine to squeeze Hollywood producer and Chicago businessman Thomas Rosenberg for a $2 million payoff or a $1.5 million campaign contribution.

Prosecutors have said the money was for Public Official A. The money was to go to Blagojevich, St. Eve said in court papers.

All of King Richard's horses, and all of King Richard's men...

This is the same Tony Rezko that Barack Obama did several real estate deals with, including the purchase of his $2 million home in Chicago a few years ago--something a state senator shouldn't be able to afford. Obama had also been known to lobby other state senators on behalf of Rezko. It's unclear if he did anything to benefit Rezko during his brief four years in the U.S. Senate.

[onewhippedpuppy]

Political corruption? Noooooooo!

[MRM]

He might not have been living off a (part time) state senator's sallary. His wife is also a Harvard educated Lawyer. I don't think she was home baking cookies. She was head of some department for Mayor Daly Junior. He also had a best selling book before he bought his house. Perhaps he made a dollar or two off that.

Obama is an old fashioned, 60s- era big government liberal in the Hubert Humphrey mold. He is the most liberal Senator in the Senate. He has a tiny record and has dodged some tough votes. His Iraq policy is equal parts pie in the sky and dangerous.

Surely his record and positions are enough to do intelectual battle with Obama without resorting to half truths and smears. By all accounts he is an honorable man. He gave up a career track where he'd be partner at Mega Huge law firm making an easy million or more a year with associates doing the hard work for him. Dislike his positions all you want, but it diminishes the political system when you make stuff up about candidates to smear them.

[legion]

What did I say that was not completely factual?

I dislike Obama because:

1) He is corrupt. Yet he gets a complete and total free pass from the press on his association with shady figures in Chicago politics.

2) His views. These have been covered extensively. The press still casts him as a moderate despite his socialist views.

So according to you, I am supposed to attack him on his views and ignore his corruption.

[MRM]

Half truths and inuendo more than outright lies.

It is intellectually dishonest to bring up Obama's house, that he paid for with his book earnings, in relation to his state senate salary and then connect him to someone being charged with corruption completely unrelated to Obama and then say "it is unclear if he did anything to benefit Rezko during his brief four years in the U.S. Senate."

It's just intellectually dishonest. If Obama is doing something shady, show us the evidence. He's not, which is why saying things like this is a smear. I don't like liberals. I'm happy to engage them in the battle of ideas because we will always win over the fuzzy headed liberals when people take time to examine their ideas. But smearing people you opose instead of debating their ideas defeats the whole purpose of our political system and diminishes us as a country. That's what I expect out of the Clintons. I expect more out of a Conservative. True conservatives would rather lose honestly (like Goldwater) instead of winning dishonestly.

[Tobra]

Originally Posted by onewhippedpuppy

Political corruption? Noooooooo!

in the windy city no less, next you will be telling me there is widespread corruption in Louisiana, that is just crazy talk.

I thought Obama was an outsider who had not been around long enough to get any dirt on his white pants.

Yeah, Obama has the purest of motives at all times because he passed on money to get power.

My Father would be sitting in Justice Kennedy's chair if he would have been willing to sacrifice his family life way back when. People make choices every single day. Would you say that seeking political power is more important than raising a family? I knew Justice Kennedy's son, and he was a pretty messed up individual. Yeah, I think the two things are connected.

[legion]

Originally Posted by MRM

Half truths and inuendo more than outright lies.

It is intellectually dishonest to bring up Obama's house, that he paid for with his book earnings, in relation to his state senate salary and then connect him to someone being charged with corruption completely unrelated to Obama and then say "it is unclear if he did anything to benefit Rezko during his brief four years in the U.S. Senate."

How is it dishonest to bring up a purchase that Rezko arranged for Obama? (Fact.) How is it dishonest to state that Obama lobbied for Rezko while in the state senate? (Fact.) Now Rezko is indicted for shaking down a businessman on behalf of the governor. (Fact.)

Originally Posted by MRM

It's just intellectually dishonest. If Obama is doing something shady, show us the evidence. He's not, which is why saying things like this is a smear. I don't like liberals. I'm happy to engage them in the battle of ideas because we will always win over the fuzzy headed liberals when people take time to examine their ideas. But smearing people you opose instead of debating their ideas defeats the whole purpose of our political system and diminishes us as a country. That's what I expect out of the Clintons. I expect more out of a Conservative. True conservatives would rather lose honestly (like Goldwater) instead of winning dishonestly.

So I'm supposed to believe that everyone he surrounds himself with is corrupt to the core, yet he is sqeaky clean? Why not? Richard Daley has gotten the same treatment for the last 20 years.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/184952,CST-NWS-obama24.article

In addition to a land deal, Sen. Barack Obama's ties to indicted dealmaker Antoin "Tony" Rezko include an internship the senator provided the son of a contributor at the request of Rezko, an Obama spokesman confirmed Saturday.
John Aramanda served as an intern for Obama for about a month in 2005, said Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs. His father is Joseph Aramanda, a Rezko business associate who was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal corruption case against Rezko. Aramanda has contributed $11,500 to Obama since 2000, Gibbs said.

"Mr. Rezko did provide a recommendation for John Aramanda," Gibbs said. "I think that it's fairly obvious that a few-week internship is not anything of benefit to Mr. Rezko or any of his businesses."

The internship revelation comes after Obama acknowledged he erred in buying property from Rezko in January. The transaction took place when it was widely known Rezko was under investigation by the U.S. attorney's office.

"It was a mistake to have been engaged with him at all in this or any other personal business dealing that would allow him, or anyone else, to believe that he had done me a favor," Obama -- a likely presidential candidate -- told the Chicago Sun-Times in November.


Alleged kickback
Rezko was indicted in October for allegedly trying to collect nearly $6 million in kickbacks from government deals and trying to shake down a Hollywood producer for $1.5 million in campaign contributions to Gov. Blagojevich.
Obama and Rezko have been friends since 1990, and the Wilmette businessman has raised as much as $60,000 in campaign contributions for him.

After Rezko's indictment, Obama donated $11,500 to charity -- the amount Rezko contributed to the senator's federal campaign fund.

Gibbs said no decision has been made on whether Obama will return any contributions from Aramanda, given his alleged role in the federal corruption cases against Rezko and former Teachers Retirement System board member Stuart Levine.

Aramanda is identified as "Individual D" in Rezko's indictment. And when Levine pleaded guilty in October, Aramanda again was listed as "Individual D."

Aramanda was identified by the Sun-Times as "Individual D," who allegedly received a $250,000 kickback tied to a scheme to steer lucrative state pension deals to firms and consultants that donated to Blagojevich. Aramanda is not specifically named or charged with criminal wrongdoing in the court papers. He did not return a call seeking comment Saturday.

Gibbs said John Aramanda served in Obama's Capitol Hill office from July 20 to Aug. 26, 2005.

[MRM]

Quote: "So I'm supposed to believe that everyone he surrounds himself with is corrupt to the core . . ."

This statement is self-evidently false. I take it you don't mean it literally, but it's that kind of hyperbole that ruins our political discourse. The point of your post was to suggest that Obama is corrupt, if not on the take; specifically that he was able to buy a $2 million house because of it. That is not true and to suggest otherwise is a smear.

Obama's ideas are dangerous. Engage him in that arena.

[Overpaid Slacker]

MRM - I respect your skepticism ... but at least the Times of London is doing some looking:

The Times of London follows the money in the journalistic tradition of Watergate and finds a strange connection between Tony Rezko, Barack Obama, and Nadhmi Auchi. The latter, one of Britain's richest men, has a long history of shady financial dealings as well as numerous connections to Saddam Hussein, who he helped to power. According to the Times, Auchi sent a lot of money to Rezko just before his wife bought property adjacent to the Obamas in a land deal that has already raised a lot of eyebrows:

A British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama's fundraiser just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender, an investigation by The Times discloses.

The money transfer raises the question of whether funds from Nadhmi Auchi, one of Britain’s wealthiest men, helped Mr Obama buy his mock Georgian mansion in Chicago.

A company related to Mr Auchi, who has a conviction for corruption in France, registered the loan to Mr Obama's bagman Antoin "Tony" Rezko on May 23 2005. Mr Auchi says the loan, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA, was for $3.5 million.

Three weeks later, Mr Obama bought a house on the city's South Side while Mr Rezko's wife bought the garden plot next door from the same seller on the same day, June 15.

Why is this important to the land deal?

Mrs Rezko paid the asking price for the garden but the Obamas bought the house for $1.65 million, - $300,000 less than the asking price. The sellers deny they offered the Obamas a discount on the house because the garden had fetched full price from Mrs Rezko.

They took 15% less than the asking price? That's a rather remarkable discount. And how exactly did the Rezkos afford to buy the adjacent plot? It cost $625,000, and they needed to make a $125,000 down payment on the land. Yet at the time, Tony Rezko had "no income, negative cash flow, no liquid assets, no unencumbered assets [and] is significantly in arrears on many of his obligations" -- according to a sworn court statement a year later. His wife had an income of $37,000 and assets of around $35,000.

How could they qualify for a mortgage on the adjacent plot? Where did they get the money for the down payment? More importantly, why did Auchi lend so much money to Rezko, when Rezko had been in such financial straits? And why was Auchi so interested in Rezko in the first place?

Let's take another look at Auchi:

Auchi's brother was among the many Baathists killed by Saddam, but the execution did not inhibit Auchi's business dealings with Iraq which, he says, didn't stop until the Gulf war of 1991. His first coup in the West was to broker a deal to sell Italian frigates to the Iraqi Defence Ministry, for which he received $17m in commission. Italian investigators claimed that a Panamanian company owned by Auchi was used to funnel allegedly illegal payments. Auchi denied he had done anything wrong.

In the mid-1980s he got to know Pierfrancesco Pacini Battaglia, a man whose role in directing money to politicians led Italians to call him 'the one below God'. Saddam Hussein had ordered the construction of a pipeline from Iraq to Saudi Arabia. Battaglia and Auchi secured the contract for a Franco-Italian consortium. In a statement to New York lawyers Battaglia alleged he knew how. 'To acquire the contract it was necessary, as is usual, especially in Middle Eastern countries, to pay commission to characters close to the Iraqi government... In this case, the international intermediary who dealt with this matter was the Iraqi, Nadhmi Auchi.' Auchi has denied any wrong-doing.


Nick Cohen suggests that Britain only extradited Auchi to France to face fraud charges in 2003 because our invasion of Iraq had ended his usefulness as an expert on the Hussein regime for MI-6. In any case, Auchi also allegedly had a hand in defrauding the UK's National Health System after his fleecing of the French oil company Elf.

Rick Moran pines for the late Mike Royko, who would have known exactly what to do with these connections:

At this point, unless there is a deliberate, concerted effort by the large media outlets to allow this story to die once Rezko is convicted, I find it probable that other revelations are yet to come that will show Obama to be just another machine politician, skirting the edge of ethics and the law – perhaps even going over the line and engaging in criminal activities.
Obama is not the Agent of Change. He is a calculating politician who plays the game the same way politicians have been playing it for hundreds of years – receiving money in exchange for favors from government for his friends and cronies. And if Mike Royko were alive, one has to believe that despite agreeing with his politics, Royko would have been relentless in taking Obama down, hammering away in his own inimitable style at the influence selling, the sweetheart deals, the pay for favors, and all the rest of this sleazy mess.

No Royko today. But we have an army of bloggers who can push this story into the mainstream and force the media to expend the resources necessary to get to the bottom of the Rezko-Obama enterprise. True, like Whitewater it is a very complex story and there is very little ease in the telling. But given the stakes, an effort should be made nonetheless.

There seems to be a lot more to Rezko than just slumlording. When a figure like Auchi gives a low-rent figure like Rezko that kind of money, he's not looking to expand tenement ownership.

[Overpaid Slacker]

I believe there is something here -- notwithstanding book royalties. A home is not the only thing he had to pay for, and a "bestselling" book doesn't solve all financial woes.

Nor is it unthinkable that a person who COULD afford a $2million home would finagle with crooks so as not to have to pay full price.

There's another article I'll look for, but, just so it doesn't go unnoticed ... the TIMES OF LONDON is publishing an investigative piece on Obama, while our own press is too busy with leg shivers and swooning... oh, except for a baseless hit piece on McCain by the NEW YORK TIMES (our non-agenda-driven, self-declared "Paper of Record").

EDIT: Here's a link to the Times article.

Quote: Mr Obama now admits his involvement in this land deal was a “boneheaded mistake”.

JP

[legion]

Originally Posted by MRM

Quote: "So I'm supposed to believe that everyone he surrounds himself with is corrupt to the core . . ."

This statement is self-evidently false. I take it you don't mean it literally, but it's that kind of hyperbole that ruins our political discourse. The point of your post was to suggest that Obama is corrupt, if not on the take; specifically that he was able to buy a $2 million house because of it. That is not true and to suggest otherwise is a smear.

Obama's ideas are dangerous. Engage him in that arena.

Res ipsa loquitur. If an airplane crashes, the burden of proof is shifted to the operator to prove that negligence has not occured. Similarly, if one is surrounded by corruption and takes corrupt actions, the burden of proof is on him to prove he is not corrupt (IMO).

[MRM]

That's not what res ipsa means, but I take your point. Show me corrupt actions on Obama's part and I'll join your denounciation. In the mean time I applaud serious investigation by the Times, even when it's someone else's Times. I just don't think that based on the evidence at hand it is fair to say Obama "surrounds" himself with corrupt people. To say that and then challenge him to prove he's not corrupt is one of the famous fallacies of rhetoric taught by Plato himself.

[Hugh R]

I love this best seller book deals. They allow supporters of a candidate to completely skirt the campaign finance laws. The supporters buy thousands of books give them away/toss them and the funds go to the candidate/person.

[Tobra]

If this were a legit deal, why would it be a "boneheaded mistake" to be involved in it?

What is this Limey Iraqui cat hoping to gain by facilitating the Honorable Senator Obama buying a multi million dollar mansion? Maybe he just liked Barry's haircut

[legion]

Originally Posted by MRM

That's not what res ipsa means, but I take your point. Show me corrupt actions on Obama's part and I'll join your denounciation. In the mean time I applaud serious investigation by the Times, even when it's someone else's Times. I just don't think that based on the evidence at hand it is fair to say Obama "surrounds" himself with corrupt people. To say that and then challenge him to prove he's not corrupt is one of the famous fallacies of rhetoric taught by Plato himself.

I was speaking to the legal doctrine, not the literal meaning in Latin.

Still, I've been close to Chicago politics for decades, and I've seen this thing dozens of times before: Dan Rostenkowski, George Ryan, Blago, many...many....many...many Chicago Alderman and Cook County board members.... I've also seen dozens of scandals in the Daley Administration that alway, suspiciously, stop just short of the top. Heck, my little sister has had to bribe aldermen to make BS traffic tickets go away...

When Obama was running for the State Senate, he miraculously went from "outsider" to "insider" over the course of that campaign. That just doesn't happen in Chicago--without making the right connections. And those connections expect payback as long as you are in office. This is just how it works. There's an awful lot of smoke around this guy, and you're asking me to prove there's a fire without seeing any flames.

[MRM]

In Latin res ipsa means "the thing speaks for itself". In the legal sense res ipsa does not shift either the burden of proof or the burden of pursuasion. The doctrine allows an inference of negligence without direct evidence of a negligent act when the event is unexpected without some negigent act and proof of the negligence would be impossible to prove because of the nature of the event. The question goes to the finder of fact with a finding of negligence as a permissible inference, not a shifted burden of proof or a mandate that the jury must find a certain way.

However, I commend you and the other posters to this thread for the high level of civility and level of discourse. While some on this thread may have been thinking what a poopyhead MRM is, no one said it out loud and instead produced evidence to support their position. For the record, I deny being a poopy head.

This discusion has elevated the inquiry into Obama's background. That's what intellectual debate is all about. I don't know whether Obama is the corrupt child of the second Daly administration, but now we have some smoke that is worth looking into further. I remember no less an oracle than Tabs saying several months ago that he was reserving judgment on Obama until it was clear whether he was independent of the Chicago political machine. I think that's a fair inquiry and I look forward to making my mind up after reviewing more evidence submitted here.

[legion]

Fair enough.

And I enjoy the debate. Your arguments were solid and specific criticisms that were easy to address (whether or not I did is certainly open to debate). Perhaps I left out much of the explanation of my thought-process initially.

Still, with Obama, I'm starting to hear the same kinds of things I've heard so many times before. Is it possible that he is squeaky-clean? Certainly. I just don't find that likely.

[MRM]

This is a good debate. You came up with significant information that I hadn't heard of before. This is a legitimate and important issue to resolve. Truman was the product of the Pendergast Machine, yet he made his reputation in the Senate as a straight arrow who oversaw the Truman Commission into wartime corruption so fairly that he was respected on both sides of the isle. He went to the funeral of his Pendergast mentor while sitting VP and he aparently never enagged in corruption himself, although later in his administration some associates were less noble.

Then we have the LBJ example where the product of machine politics went into office in order to enrich his machine and paid off his backers with the ultimate jackpot once he reached his final goal.

It is important to know which of these two Obama is before the die is cast.

[legion]

Can we all agree that Blago is corrupt and self-serving, and probably heading for a bunk with George Ryan?

[gprsh924]

Originally Posted by legion

Can we all agree that Blago is corrupt and self-serving, and probably heading for a bunk with George Ryan?

Yes