David C. Farmer, Trustee vs. Harmon - Witness Governor Rod Glagojevich

David C. Farmer, Successor-Trustee vs. Harmon

(Formerly Woo vs. Harmon & Nicholson vs. Harmon)

U.S. District Court For the District of Hawaii

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DEFENDANT’S WITNESS

GOVERNOR ROD BLAGOJEVICH

Milorad "Rod" R. Blagojevich (born December 10, 1956) is an American politician from the state of Illinois. A Democrat, Blagojevich currently serves as governor of Illinois and previously represented parts of Chicago in the U.S. Congress. He is the second Serbian American to be elected governor of any state of the United States, after George Voinovich of Ohio.

Blagojevich was the first Democrat to be elected governor of Illinois in 30 years (since Daniel Walker in 1972). Blagojevich has struggled annually to pass legislation and budgets, often opposed by many members of his own party (which controls the Illinois General Assembly) who perennially disagree with him over budget and other issues. He has been the target of multiple federal investigations and has historically low approval ratings within Illinois; Rasmussen called him "America's Least Popular Governor."

On December 9, 2008, Blagojevich was arrested by FBI agents and charged with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud as well as solicitation of bribery. The Justice Department complaint alleges that the governor conspired to commit several "pay to play" schemes, including attempting to sell President-elect Barack Obama's vacated United States Senate seat to the highest bidder. As a result of the arrest, Blagojevich has faced calls for his resignation or impeachment and removal from office....

Legislator

With the backing of his influential father-in-law, alderman Richard Mell, who used his connections to get 200 soldiers to campaign for him, Blagojevich won a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives in 1992, against an entrenched incumbent. Most of his legislative accomplishments centered on crime and justice issues.... He drew on his experiences as a prosecutor to draft bills that he argued would strengthen the state's judicial system and cut crime. He voted for Ronald Reagan for President in the 1980s.

In 1996, Blagojevich gave up his seat in the state house to run in Illinois's 5th congressional district. The district had long been represented by the powerful Democrat, Daniel Rostenkowski, who served as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Rostenkowski was defeated for reelection in 1994 after pleading guilty to mail fraud, being succeeded by Republican Mike Flanagan. Blagojevich soundly defeated Flanagan with support from his father-in-law. He was elected two more times, taking 74 percent against a nominal Republican challenger in 1998 and facing only a Libertarian in 2000.

In Congress, he continued to advocate what he called anti-crime measures, especially gun control legislation. He was not known as a particularly active congressman, but Blagojevich gained some prominence ... in the late 1990s when he traveled with Jesse Jackson to Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia to negotiate with President Slobodan Milošević for the release of American prisoners of war.

On October 10, 2002, Rod Blagojevich was among the 81 House Democrats who voted in favor of authorizing the invasion of Iraq. He was the only Democrat from Illinois to vote in favor of the Iraq War.

Gubernatorial campaigns

2002 election

In 2002, Blagojevich ran for his party's nomination to become governor....

During the primary, state Senator Barack Obama backed former Attorney General Burris, but supported Blagojevich after he won the primary, serving as a "top adviser" for the general election. Future Obama senior adviser David Axelrod had previously worked with Blagojevich on Congressional campaigns, but did not consider Blagojevich ready to be governor and declined to work for him on this campaign.

According to Rahm Emanuel, he, Barack Obama, Blagojevich's campaign co-chair David Wilhelm, and another Blagojevich staffer "were the top strategists of Blagojevich's 2002 gubernatorial victory," meeting weekly to outline campaign strategies. However, Wilhelm has said that Emanuel overstated Obama's role in the sessions, and Emanuel said in December 2008 that Wilhelm was correct and he had been wrong in his earlier 2008 recollection to The New Yorker. By all accounts, Blagojevich and Barack Obama have been estranged for years....

2006 re-election

During 2005 to 2006, Blagojevich served as Federal Liaison for the Democratic Governors Association. Numerous scandals brought the Governor's approval rating as low as 36%, with 56% "disapproving" near the end of 2005. By early 2006, five Republicans ran in the primary for the right to challenge him in the general election, with state treasurer Judy Baar Topinka eventually winning the nomination. Blagojevich formally launched his 2006 re-election campaign for Governor of Illinois on February 19, 2006....

Blagojevich was endorsed by many Democratic leaders (with the notable exception of Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who claimed it was a conflict of interest since her office was investigating Blagojevich), including then-Illinois Senator Barack Obama, who endorsed the governor in early 2005 and spoke on his behalf at the August 2006 Illinois State Fair. Blagojevich was also endorsed by the state's Sierra Club, the only Illinois governor ever endorsed by the organization. The union American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees declined to endorse Blagojevich for re-election, citing the 500 jobs he cut from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, which left some state parks unsupervised.

In the general election, Blagojevich defeated Topinka and the Green Party's Rich Whitney. He attempted to tie Topinka to former Republican governor George Ryan's corruption. Topinka ran ads detailing Blagojevich's federal investigations and non-endorsements by major state Democrats such as Lisa Madigan. A three-term state treasurer, Topinka said that she had attempted to block Blagojevich from using money from special funds for general expenditures without approval of the legislature; she said Blagojevich used the funds for projects meant to distract voters from his associates' corruption trials: “This constant giving away of money … a million here, a million there, it raids our already hamstrung government and deadbeat state.” Topinka's spokesman claimed that Blagojevich was the "most investigated" governor in Illinois history. Topinka lost to Blagojevich by 11%.

Gubernatorial administration

After the 2002 elections, Democrats had control of the Illinois House, Senate, and all but one statewide office. Since taking office, Blagojevich has signed numerous pieces of progressive legislation such as ethics reform, death penalty reform, a state Earned Income Tax Credit, a statewide comprehensive smoking ban and expansions of health programs like KidCare and FamilyCare (the latter ruled unconstitutional).

Blagojevich signed a bill in 2005 that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing, public accommodations, and credit.

During a suspected shortage of the flu vaccine, Blagojevich ordered 260,000 doses from overseas distributors, which the FDA had warned would be barred from entering the United States. Although the vaccine doses had cost the state $2.6 million, the FDA refused to allow them into the country, and a buyer could not be found; they were donated to earthquake survivors in Pakistan a year later.

After Blagojevich pushed for a law banning sales of certain video games to minors, a federal judge declared the law violated the First Amendment, with the state ordered to pay $520,000 in legal fees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Blagojevich

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December 10, 2008

Blagojevich questions censored on Transition site

President-elect Barack Obama's Transition today launched "Open for Questions," a Digg-style feature allowing citizens to submit questions, and to vote on one another's questions, bringing favored inquiries to the top of the list.

It was suggested when it launched that the tool would bring uncomfortable questions to the fore, but the results so far are the opposite: Obama's supporters appear to be using -- and abusing -- a tool allowing them to "flag" questions as "inappropriate" to remove all questions mentioning Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich from the main pages of Obama's website.

The Blagojevich questions -- many of them polite and reasonable -- can be found only by searching words in them, like "Blagojevich," which produces 35 questions missing from the main page of the site.

"Given the current corruption charges involving Blagojevich, will 'serious' campaign finance reform that takes money completely out of politics through publicly funded elections be a priority in the first term?" asked Metteyya of Santa Cruz, California.

"This submission was removed because people believe it is inappropriate," reads the text underneath it.

Also removed as "inappropriate":

"In light of the recent corruption scandals (Blagojevich, Rangel, Jefferson, Stevens, etc) that have dominated the political scene,is there any ethics legislation being crafted to actually curb corruption and prevent another wave of nixonian cynicism?", a question from "lupercal," of Gainesville.

And: "Is Barack Obama aware of any communications in the last six weeks between Rod Blagojevich or anyone representing Rod Blagojevich and any of Obama's top aides?", a question from Phil from Pennsylvania.

Declaring a question "inappropriate" is different from merely voting it down; it's calling foul on a question, not just disapproving of it.

Community reporting systems like this are often vulnerable to abuse from committed partisans -- YouTube has wrestled with a parallel problem -- and the only solution is conscious efforts to remedy it.

So far, Obama's team does not seem to have stepped in to allow uncomfortable questions to rise to the top, and instead is allowing his supporters to sanitize the site.

By Ben Smith 08:04 PM

Blagojevich questions censored on Transition site

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Governor Rod Blagojevich is expected to testify regarding his business, professional, political and personal relationships with Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Ben Cayetano, John Waihee, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, The Nature Conservancy, and others to be named upon discovery.