Fundraiser A: My Fight for Freedom and Justice by Robert Blagojevich

Author:Robert Blagojevich [Blagojevich, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Political, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781609091743
Google: Sq68DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 24343281
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2015-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

During this three-minute, forty-second call with Rod, I said “yeah,” “a huh,” “mm-hmm,” “right,” or “okay” thirty-two times. We had been together only an hour or so earlier. I was anxious to get him off the phone because he had ignored the fact I was having coffee with Julie and he had continued the conversation as if she weren’t there. If one had listened to all the other fifteen hundred conversations the FBI eavesdropped on and heard, as the government had, one would know I was not intending to commit a crime. At the conclusion of the conversation, I wasn’t sure what Rod wanted me to tell Nayak, but I agreed to set up a meeting and did so shortly after this conversation. This call was interpreted by the government as a felonious furtherance of a criminal act—a scheme to deny honest services to the citizens of Illinois.

Prior to hearing the surveillance tape and all throughout trial preparation, I struggled to remember the specifics of this particular conversation with Rod. No matter what I did to jog my memory—repeatedly listening to the call, going back to the Starbucks several times and sitting there, researching our credit card bill for the purchase we made at the time—I still couldn’t fully recall all the particulars. I can only conclude that this call was so incidental to everything I was doing at FOB that it didn’t stick with me.

Typically, when Rod wanted to talk with me, his conversation seemed to be triggered by something that happened just prior to his call. It was not part of a coherent strategy or follow-up. It was an impulse. After four months of working with him, I became frustrated by his pattern and reacted with a kind of impatient tolerance. I cringed when I knew Rod wanted to talk with me because I knew the conversation wasn’t likely to be productive or helpful to me as a fundraiser. This was the case during that fateful call on December 4. As we later said during the trial, Rod and I had not talked about Nayak or Jackson for more than a month when he called me out of the blue at the Starbucks.

When I reviewed the complaint for the first time on the morning of Rod’s arrest five days later, I read the government’s reference to this conversation and to the call I had made to Nayak. At the time, I was so worked up that I couldn’t remember if I initiated the call to Nayak or whether he had called me. I frantically reviewed the call history on my phone to refresh my memory only to find that, in fact, I did call him as the complaint alleged. As I sat there after looking at my call history, I felt a sense of resignation and realized that forces more powerful than I were aligning to misconstrue my actions and use them against me.

The transcript reveals that Rod said that I should “be careful how I expressed that

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