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Matt Cooper Sends Blago Some Advice About Patrick Fitzgerald
Journalist Matt Cooper, who almost got put in jail during Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the Valerie Plame leak, has some suggestions for disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Here's Cooper, writing in Portfolio:
[Fitzgerald's] a hard ass, but a reasonable one and I think, if you believe you are guilty and are going to lose at trial, you might get a decent deal out of this. Sure, you'll have to do time but you're a relatively young guy. Fitz will deal....
You wanna deal with Fitzgerald directly, you and him. When I became a government witness, he interviewed me alone and knew the details of my case better than I did....
As I discovered in my prison research, there's really no such thing as a country club prison any more. Even minimum-security facilities like the one I wanted to go to in Cumberland, Maryland, aren't fun. They're crowded, filled with check kiters and drug dealers and other folks you don't want to share a bunk with.
But you won't get shanked there or raped and you'll be able to get through your time. That's if you get a sentence that's less than seven years. Anything longer and you'll have to go to a tougher federal lockup.
I'd shoot for the minimum security and seven years in prison. You can argue that you won't really be safe in anything tougher and that argument might appeal to Fitzy.
Contrition is key here. This is a guy who went to the best parochial school in New York and like those tough Jesuits who taught him, he can smell a liar. If you beg for mercy, you might get it.
The difference being, of course, that Cooper was neither the target of Fitzgerald's investigation, nor a particularly impressive hide to nail to the wall. Who, exactly, will Blagojevich be able to inform on?
Who, exactly, will Blagojevich be able to inform on?
Well, power brokering takes both buyers and sellers. I wouldn't mind scooping a few of the buyers out of the mix in the process of neutralizing a seller.
7 years in Min Sec will not be fun for somebody like Blagojevich and being a felon should exclude him from future public office (except in Alaska). If we can clearly and definitively blacklist (or even imprison) a few more people with more money than brains, I think that would be a good end to this story.
I guess any one who expressed interest in Obama's Senate seat is a potential big fish-But Blago is a plenty big fish--
Isn't it kind of like netting the head of a drug cartel and expecting him to tell about all the people selling his goods ? Blago seemed to be the instigator here. It's hard to see what he could have, to deal. He already said on the wire tap that he couldn't anything more than lip service out of Obama. And Daley is going around his back directly to the Feds to get money for roads that was going to flow through the state first.
Tough to see much of a bargaining position for old Blago. Good riddance for a long time, I hope...
Isn't it kind of like netting the head of a drug cartel and expecting him to tell about all the people selling his goods ?
Sort of, but if you nabbed the head of a drug cartel and you could take out a bunch of the higher-ups in his organization as well, wouldn't you want to? And if you knew that his conviction and informant status excluded him from ever being in the drug world again, wouldn't it be worth shaving a few years off of his sentence?
Now, lets make fair comparisons, since Blago's nastiness isn't getting anybody killed (or at least so far that we've found out), why wouldn't we want to clean up as much shit from the political sphere as possible? A conviction plus a decent sentence is the end of Blago in politics. Why not ferret out some of the other weasels who were hogging around in the chicken coop?