Obama Keeps U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald

Obama is reviewing all of the 93 U.S. attorney positions, which are appointed by the president, but Fitzgerald is first to stay.

NBC: Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago who brought criminal fraud charges against Rod Blagojevich, will be staying in his job in the Obama administration, even though he was appointed to the position by President George W. Bush.

Pamela Davis Kickstarted the Blago Investigation

Pamela Davis, mother of three and CEO of Edward Hospital, just wanted state approval to expand her Illinois hospital. But some business men tried to extort her -- If you don't use this contractor then you can't expand, they told her. Her call to the FBI (they laughed at her) eventually led to the wiretapping of Blago. This is a really interesting (and short and sweet) story because the New Yorker writer tells the story from the perspective of a working mom learning spy craft. She'll have a book coming out. 

That episode helped start United States Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s Operation Board Games. For the next seven months, Pamela Davis, hospital administrator, became Pamela Davis, secret agent, helping to expose a multimillion-dollar scam that at times resembled a spinoff of “The Sopranos,” guest-starring the back office from “Grey’s Anatomy.” Davis attended long lunches and boozy dinners with crooked businessmen, listening (and taping) as they talked of grafting off the hospital industry. She would slip the tapes to her F.B.I. handlers at Marshall Field’s makeup counters in malls around suburban Chicago.
Davis taped all sorts of incriminating conversations, but she never quite got used to spycraft. “The wire is a little tiny square thing I put inside my bra. I thought it would fall out all the time,” she said. “Oh, the logistics of getting this stuff done! One morning, I had to meet one of the F.B.I. guys in my office at 6 A.M. so he could hook up a wire to tap my phone. He was under my desk, on the floor. It looks kinky! My administrative assistant pops her head in, and there’s this man under my desk, and she says, ‘Oh, my goodness,’ and leaves. And I go, ‘What am I supposed to tell her?’ He says, ‘I don’t know. That never happened to me before.’ ” Read the whole thing.

Blago Pales Next To Washington and Wall Street Scandals

Frank Rich makes a point:

Blagojevich’s alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street. Yet those who promoted and condoned the twin national catastrophes of reckless war in Iraq and reckless gambling in our markets have largely escaped the accountability that now seems to await the Chicago punk nabbed by the United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald.

The Republican partisans cheering Fitzgerald’s prosecution of a Democrat have forgotten his other red-letter case in this decade, his conviction of Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby was far bigger prey. He was part of the White House Iraq Group, the task force of propagandists that sold an entire war to America on false pretenses. Because Libby was caught lying to a grand jury and federal prosecutors as well as to the public, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. But President Bush commuted the sentence before he served a day.