Yesterday’s complaint against Blagojevich has … silences worthy of note. We know this, partly, because Patrick Fitzgerald tells us. He makes it clear that he has not included everything he’s got in this case, generally.Because this affidavit is submitted for the limited purpose of securing a criminal complaint and corresponding arrest warrants, I have not included each and every fact known to me concerning this investigation.
That is, Fitz has only laid out what he needs to make the case on the two charges described here – the conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud to deprive Illinois of his honest services… , and the attempt to extort the Tribune Company. Note already how this shifts the focus onto recent events … and away from his larger investigation into corruption; this allows him to keep much of the latter investigation hidden for now. Indeed, note how the general corruption investigation generally jumps from evidence from the 2004 timeframe presented at Rezko’s trial to stuff collected from the wiretaps…
Similarly, Fitz tells us that he hasn’t revealed everything pertaining to Blago’s attempt to sell Obama’s Senate seat.
Set out below are summaries of certain of the conversations referenced above. This affidavit does not include all calls dealing with the corrupt efforts of ROD BLAGOJEVICH, JOHN HARRIS, and others to misuse the power of ROD BLAGOJEVICH to appoint a United States Senator for the personal gain of ROD BLAGOJEVICH and his family, nor does this affidavit set forth other calls where ROD BLAGOJEVICH and others discussed a possible appointment to the Senate seat based on considerations other than financial gain for ROD BLAGOJEVICH and his family, discussions which took place with greater frequency after efforts to arrange for a private job for ROD BLAGOJEVICH in exchange for appointing a particular candidate to the open Senate seat did not meet with success…Now, in this case, I don’t so much think Fitz is hiding how he got the evidence about the Senate seat. We know that: he discovered this in the course of his taps regarding campaign donations.
Overall, I think Fitz leaves all this unsaid for two reasons: to hide the extent to which he may have gotten cooperation from witnesses. More importantly … to encourage those who have evidence about this stuff to come forward on their own accord to provide information to investigators. Fitz knows he hasn’t nailed this prosecution yet, and he’s trying to turn the lemon of having to arrest Blago early into lemonade, by using the complaint to encourage cooperation from others. So he has repeatedly provided enough in the complaint to let people know he’s investigating them, without revealing everything he has against those people…
What about the Editorial Page? In the world of my childhood, it lagged days behind the news. The only exception I recall was my local paper’s indictment of Brown versus the Board of Education on the day the decision came down [the South has changed some since then]. Now, editorials appear within minutes or hours. The blogs are instantly editorial, and will probably endure in that role.
But some bloggers, notably emptywheel, have moved things a step further. She offers more than opinion. She is an analyst, and an amazingly effective one. She is a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, and is a master of the "close read" [as the graduate students like to say]. But instead of applying her skills to obscure 17th century poems or the musings of post-modernist writers, she reads the news and the primary documents that are attached. She reads between the linesand translates that which hasn’t been directly said into terms the rest of us "loose readers" can follow [or sometimes follow]. The master is eriposte, but his offerings are rare and almost too dense to follow without another translation or two. Josh Marshall and his TPM staff do a similar thing – put the news into a broad context quickly. They, for example, were on top of the U.S. Attorney story immediately. Without them, I’m not sure it would’ve stayed in the light long enough to register. And then, of course, there’s always Digby, the soothsayer of the bogging world.
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