
Federal prosecutors have spent five weeks showing Rod Blagojevich spewed a river of profanity while lavishing money on his wardrobe and ducking his job as governor of Illinois. But will jurors believe he was a racketeer who schemed to sell or trade Barack Obama’s former U.S. Senate seat for personal gain?
The government plans to rest as early as Tuesday, after presenting a case based heavily on wiretaps in which jurors heard Blagojevich saying he wanted something in return for the seat.
“I’ve got this thing and it’s (expletive) golden — I’m just not giving it up for (expletive) nothing,” Blagojevich plainly says on one of the most-quoted tapes.
But once prosecutors finish, the ousted governor’s defense team is guaranteed to tell jurors that while Blagojevich may have had a vivid imagination, he wasn’t the bad guy prosecutors allege.
“The first thing they do is portray Blagojevich as the buffoon that he is,” says DePaul University law professor Leonard Cavise, who has been on hand for much of the testimony. “They say, look, he has a bad mouth, he has a loose mouth. He spent a lot of time thinking about things other than the state of Illinois. But he’s not a crook.”





