Category Archives: Chicago machine

Barack Obama

Arrest

Part 2

I was going over some notes, preparing to put up the next article explaining in detail why Barack Obama should have already been arrested when I came across some old articles that I had saved. The articles were so compelling on their own that I decided to present them as standalone evidence that Obama and Blagojevich should have been indicted and arrested by mid 2008. This leaves several glaring questions.

Why did Patrick Fitzgerald and the US Dept of Justice wait until after the election to arrest Blagojevich? The excuse of waiting for the US Senate seat to be sold was a diversion. There was plenty of evidence against Blagojevich. The amount of evidence placed before the public was sufficient and Fitzgerald has much more.

If you arrest Blagojevich, you have to arrest Obama. Obama was just as steeped in Chicago and IL corruption.

Perhaps that was the reason for focusing on the selling of the IL senate seat.

However, if you examine the complaint and subsequent indictment of Blagojevich, you will see the same references to corruption that ensnares Obama.

And now Obama has picked Fitzgerald to be the Interim chairman of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys.

What does that mean? 
What is also significant about the following articles is that they came from the Main Stream Media. However, prescious little of this was revealed on television.

From the LA Times blog, Top of the Ticket, April 7, 2008:

“Ticket Special Report: Obama and Rezko, the early years”

“The trial of Antoin “Tony” Rezko, one-time patron to Sen. Barack Obama and Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, has turned lurid.
 
Under cross-examination by Rezko attorney Joseph Duffy, star prosecution witness Stuart Levine, a Chicago-area lawyer, is admitting to conspiracy, extortion, bribery, fraud and other bad acts while he “served” at the Illinois public school teachers pension fund board.
 
At Duffy’s urging, Levine is detailing 30 years of drug usage including sordid day-long binges with other men at a Chicago inn called the Purple Hotel. Rezko’s attorney Duffy is wondering whether all that cocaine, crystal meth and other drug use has perhaps fogged Levine’s memory.
 
That aside, much of the trial’s focus is on money — much of it given in the form of campaign money in the careers of Obama and Blagojevich.
 
It’s an unfolding, seemingly local political story that’s fascinating in its revealing details about the subterranean world of business, financial and family connections in Illinois and Chicago politics that helped take a virtually unknown black Chicago attorney, nurtured him politically and financially and turned him into….
 
the polished candidate who today thrills crowds of thousands across the country with his eloquence.
 
Obama currently leads in delegates for the Democratic nomination for president.
 
This tale is long by Ticket standards. We’ll do this rarely. But for those interested in delving into details it provides important background about the early political connections of a little-known newcomer to the national political scene.
 
This story concerns two men, neither of whom face any legal charges today. They are two of Illinois’ top Democratic politicians — Gov. Blagojevich, who’s been mentioned often in court, and Sen. Obama, who’s received only passing mentions. They’re entwined in the Rezko saga, particularly through the bounteous campaign money he raised for them both.
 
Get used to that name. Rezko’s currently in a long-running Chicago trial on federal extortion and bribery charges. Few campaign donors were more responsible than Rezko for the rise of Blagojevich (Blah-goy-ah-vitch) and Obama. Both politicians came to rely on him for political and personal advice — and lots of campaign money.
 
 
 
Their intimate relationship is coming into focus through Rezko, a Syrian-born businessman who made his money in real estate and restaurant franchises and now sits daily in the federal courtroom of U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve. The trial’s daily events are covered in this Tribune Rezko court blog.
 
So far, Blagojevich, reelected in 2006, is more deeply enmeshed in the scandal than Obama, who’s not been implicated in any wrongdoing.
 
But all three operated in the murky world of Illinois Democratic politics, where money, family relationships and long business associations provide the invisible glue of the local political world.
 
Witnesses in Rezko’s trial have testified that Rezko recommended friends and associates for government jobs and posts on Illinois state boards when Blagojevich took office in 2003, and some of those friends were generous donors to Blagojevich.
 
An early trial exhibit from prosecutors was a spreadsheet. Prepared by an FBI agent , the spreadsheet identifies Rezko-related donors who supplied $1.43 million between 2001 and 2004 to Blagojevich, who was first elected governor in 2002.
 
Using Federal Election Commission and Illinois state records, The Times’ Dan Morain compared donors on the FBI spreadsheet to Obama’s contributors. Guess what.
 
Sen. Obama received $222,000 during the same 2001-2004 period from Rezko-related Blagojevich donors.
 
And Obama received at least another $32,000 from them for this presidential run — although Rezko, indicted in 2006, has not been involved in Obama’s current campaign.
 
Those Obama-Blagojevich donors include Rezko himself, along with his family members, employees and associates of his various business enterprises. There’s also the head of a major Chicago investment firm that received Illinois public teachers’ pension money to invest.”

Read more:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/04/obamarezko.html

From the Chicago SunTimes April 23, 2007:
“Obama and his Rezko ties
DAY ONE OF TWO”
“For more than five weeks during the brutal winter of 1997, tenants shivered without heat in a government-subsidized apartment building on Chicago’s South Side.
 
It was just four years after the landlords — Antoin “Tony” Rezko and his partner Daniel Mahru — had rehabbed the 31-unit building in Englewood with a loan from Chicago taxpayers.

Rezko and Mahru couldn’t find money to get the heat back on.

But their company, Rezmar Corp., did come up with $1,000 to give to the political campaign fund of Barack Obama, the newly elected state senator whose district included the unheated building.
 
Obama has been friends with Rezko for 17 years. Rezko has been a political patron to Obama and many others, helping to raise millions of dollars for them through his own contributions and by hosting fund-raisers in his home.
 
Obama, who has worked as a lawyer and a legislator to improve living conditions for the poor, took campaign donations from Rezko even as Rezko’s low-income housing empire was collapsing, leaving many African-American families in buildings riddled with problems — including squalid living conditions, vacant apartments, lack of heat, squatters and drug dealers.
 
The building in Englewood was one of 30 Rezmar rehabbed in a series of troubled deals largely financed by taxpayers.

Every project ran into financial difficulty. More than half went into foreclosure, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.
 
“Their buildings were falling apart,” said a former city official. “They just didn’t pay attention to the condition of these buildings.”
 
Eleven of Rezko’s buildings were in Obama’s state Senate district.
 
Obama, now a U.S. senator running for president, has come under fire over his friendship with Rezko, who was charged last fall with demanding kickbacks on state business deals under Gov. Blagojevich.”
 

“Rezko and Mahru had no construction experience when they created Rezmar in 1989 to rehabilitate apartments for the poor under the Daley administration. Between 1989 and 1998, Rezmar made deals to rehab 30 buildings, a total of 1,025 apartments. The last 15 buildings involved Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland during Obama’s time with the firm.
 
Rezko and Mahru also managed the buildings, which were supposed to provide homes for poor people for 30 years. Every one of the projects ran into trouble:”
 
•                         Seventeen buildings — many beset with code violations, including a lack of heat — ended up in foreclosure.
 
•                         Six buildings are currently boarded up.
 
•                         Hundreds of the apartments are vacant, in need of major repairs.
 
•                         Taxpayers have been stuck with millions in unpaid loans.
 
•                         At least a dozen times, the city of Chicago sued Rezmar for failure to heat buildings.”
“Obama works on Rezmar deals

Obama spent the next eight years serving in the Illinois Senate and continued to work for the Davis law firm.  Through its partnerships, Rezmar remained a client of the firm, according to ethics statements Obama filed while a state senator.”
“But Obama did legal work on real estate deals while at Davis’ firm, according to biographical information he submitted to the Sun-Times in 1998. Obama specialized “in civil rights litigation, real estate financing, acquisition, construction and/or redevelopment of low-and moderate income housing,” according to his “biographical sketch.”
 
And he did legal work on Rezko’s deals, according to an e-mail his presidential campaign staff sent the Sun-Times on Feb. 16, in response to earlier inquiries. The staff didn’t specify which Rezmar projects Obama worked on, or his role. But it drew a distinction between working for Rezko and working on projects involving his company.”

Read more:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/353829,CST-NWS-rez23.article