2005

Two Bits that Suggest Fitzgerald is Working an Angle Beyond just one-shot indictments

Over at Think Progress there are two bits. One is from Steve Clemons report that the Special Prosecutor’s Office has rented some space, and second is that Rove’s legal team is furiously trying to avoid a perjury charge.

Expecting this to be a longer process fits with building a case through lower indictments as is rattling Rove to get him to cooperate….

I’m just saying. The guy is a lot smarter than I am so I could be missing three of four layers here, but I think there’s a lot more than what we are going to hear about today.

It’s not just that half aren’t implemented

It’s the type of issues not implemented:

Lack of Documentation in contract files

Use of Contractor work in developing RFP specifications

For a start—more tomorrow, but this should send the Audit Committee into orbit. Lack of documentation? WTF? How hard is basic document control and procedural standard practice?

This reads like a dysfunctional city agency that doesn’t have the capacity or expertise to perform basic accounting practices. Except, wait, this is Central Management Services that is supposed to be leading the way the Administration Changes Business As Usual (TM). CMS is supposed to show the other agencies how it is done….

From my background, I’m waiting to hear that the files are annotated with my favorite accounting practice–post it notes on the inside cover!

46% of Recommendations Not Implemented

Makes a goo-goo twitch:

SYNOPSIS

The FY04 Report contained 24 findings and recommendations. We determined, as of September 16, 2005, that the Department had:

? Implemented 6 (25%) of the recommendations;

? Partially implemented 4 (17%) of the recommendations;

? Not implemented 11 (46%) of the recommendations; and

? Due to the nature and timing of the required tests, the status of the remaining 3 (12%) recommendations could not be determined at this time. The status of those findings will be reported in the Department’s Financial Audit and Compliance Examination for the year ended June 30, 2005.

Specific matters noted by the auditors are detailed on the following pages.

On the good side, no one’s going to be attacking Holland anytime soon.

When a Perjury Charge isn’t just a Perjury Charge

Murray Waas discusses the possibility that Patrick Fitzgerald may request to extend or empanel a new grand jury and yet bring indictments.

Having observed Fitzgerald over the last few years, I find this to be the most likely scenario.

In his high profiles cases that I’ve followed, Fitzgerald is not the kind of guy to shoot all of his ammunition at once. He’s strategic in what he brings at any given time with the seeming strategy to leverage current indictments to move up the food chain.

In the case of the License for Bribes scandal centering on fundraising in the Illinois Secretary of State’s office under George Ryan the initial indictments built up from the front line employees (and this started under Fitzgerald’s predecessor Scott Lasser). Those front line employees were then flipped to report on the low level political employees who flipped on mid and high level political people until it reached Scott Fawell and others like Roger “The Hog” Stanley. In the case of Ryan, it seems that Fitzgerald had more than one strategy to get to Ryan. The first was threatening Ryan’s daughter and indicting the campaign itself. The second, and the one that appears to have borne fruit, was to target Scott Fawell. Neither worked at first in terms of getting to Ryan, so Fitzgerald kept at it until he identified Fawell’s weakness: his fiancee Alexandra “Andrea” Coutretsis.

Fawell too, is claiming his trial is the criminalization of politics. He just doesn’t have an army of pundits get on Fox News and repeat it ad nauseum.

Coutretsis was squeezed on a lying to the grand jury charge. Fitzgerald then gave Fawell a choice–testify and cooperate against Ryan or Coutretsis goes to jail. Testify, she gets probation. Fitzgerald found the weakness and Fawell has been on the stand testifying against his old boss. It’s important to note that Fawell probably only felt a greater sense of obligation to one person other than Ryan and that was to Coutretsis.

In the Chicago investigations that revolve around the Daley administration, he’s used the same tactics. He started low, and built up to the high level political people with Daley’s current patronage chief, Sorich, under indictment as well as former patronage head Victor Reyes who now heads the Hispanic Democratic Organization (HDO). To get to that spot, Fitzgerald went after Daniel Katalinic. The Tribune describes the situation:

Katalinic, a former deputy commissioner in the Department of Streets and Sanitation, has been cooperating for months with federal authorities investigating a massive City Hall hiring scheme stretching back to 1993.

His lawyer, Jeffrey Steinback, told U.S. District Judge David Coar that he expected Katalinic to change his plea to guilty within the next three to four weeks. Katalinic’s next court date was set for Nov. 15.

“Mr. Katalinic will plead guilty,” Steinback said outside the courtroom. “He has cooperated with the government, and he will continue to cooperate with the government.”

Katalinic, 54, has provided evidence against others and has secretly recorded conversations. He was indicted last month along with Robert Sorich, Daley’s longtime patronage chief; Timothy McCarthy, a former Sorich aide; John Sullivan, a managing deputy commissioner in Streets and Sanitation; and Patrick Slattery, an ex-Streets and Sanitation official.

Mayor Daley is probably hoping Reyes or Sorich don’t have a fiancee to be gone after. Seriously, I don’t know if Daley will ever be reached or that he did much more than tolerate the atmosphere, but I’m convinced that if he was involved, one guy can demonstrate that and his name Patrick Fitzgerald.

In a very different case, Fitzgerald and many others saw Matt Hale as a domestic terrorist and so he developed an informer in the Hale organization who flipped on Hale and led to Hale’s imprisonment for plotting to kill Judge Lefkow. He started lower when he had evidence of a problem, and methodically developed a case against the eventual target.

In the Lee Daniels case, it’s been pretty clear that the lower level fruit were a stepping stone to get Mike Tristano, Daniels’ former Chief of Staff. Back when Daniels was Minority Leader in the Illinois House, Rich Miller, amongst others, started to break a whole bunch of confidential sources that told of doing political work on state time. The low level fruit were gone after by Fitzgerald who then built up to an indictment against Tristano. Tristano, until recently, was considered a stumbling block because whatever Daniels knew, Tristano was probably the only guy who could tell the whole story–he was the buffer between Daniels and the rest of the House Republican campaign operation (and probably kept Saviano from kicking Daniels’ ass in caucus meetings).

Most think a recent court appearance in which the Federal Prosecutors indicated that Tristano probably would not stand trial means Tristano flipped and in some way will testify against Daniels.

The last U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois was a guy named Scott Lasser who was generally seen as an honest guy, but most of his public corruption trials involved alderman and other assorted small fry. Lasser always seemed to be complaining behind the scenes that he couldn’t get anyone to talk. The reason is obvious from the outside, Lasser looked to build a case and do it at one time. He never exhibited a pattern of building cases slowly and then moving up the food chain. He wasn’t corrupt by any account, but perhaps not very imaginative.

Peter Fitzgerald brought in a Patrick Fitzgerald to change that sense of helplessness. Fitzgerald had worked a number of different kind of cases, but the big ones were two terrorism cases involving the first World Trade Center bombing and the African Embassy Bombings. What isn’t mentioned as much, but is probably as critical to how he tries white collar crime, is he participated in several mafia related prosecutions including one of the Gambino trials.

What does all this mean assuming indictments come down tomorrow? It means that most likely, they won’t be the last and the purpose of them may not be simply to bring justice and an end to the investigation. If Fitzgerald thinks he needs to crack someone to get the top banana, he’ll use all the pressure he has available to get Libby or Rove or someone else to flip if that is where he feels the law will take him.

More importantly, it may not be readily apparent to those of us watching the indictments come down what his strategy is. Is a perjury charge against Karl Rove just a perjury charge? Maybe, but I doubt it. Don’t get me wrong, I doubt he’s after Bush himself, but the Vice President is certainly a real possibility and I don’t think it’s beyond comprehension that if Rove thought it would help George Bush, he’d throw Cheney under a bus–and if I can figure that out, so can Patrick Fitzgerald.

We’ll hear some people try and defend the Administration by attacking Fitzgerald. Some attempts like Hutchison’s hystrically and hypocritically critizicizing perjury charges won’t work because of their audacity. Others may make some headway, but that’s the thing–attacking him for ‘just’ a perjury charge, misses that he uses such charges as a stepping stone, not just to put a notch in his belt. It may well be that the person with the perjury charge is the person with the least to worry about.

Busy Until Later, but Two Things

It’s going to be a hard task for Republicans and Democrats to try and complain about Fitzgerald while praising him….

Let’s remember an essential fact in relation to what is going to happen with Fitzgerald’s investigation:

It is important for Luskin to get his defense started now because he knows that what one appeals court judge in the case called “the plot against Wilson” is going to become public when the prosecutor reveals everything he has already revealed only to the judges.

For some reason the press is skipping over the most telling evidence that is public–actual court documents.

In one sense, this case shows the greatest weakness of the two sides tell a story coverage too many in the media have argued is just balance. In this case, every sign is pointing towards a plot to discredit a man and one that used his wife’s covert status as a weapon. The surprise, given the one bit of information that can be gleaned from Fitzgerald, would be if a conspiracy indictment isn’t a part of what he hands down.

Illinois Democrats 100 out of 100!

Yep, a political scientist just did a study on state party web sites–coming in dead last?

Not Mississippi

Not Arkansas,

Not even Missouri

Illinois Democrats. (power point summary)

Illinois Republicans come in at 34

Now, the Party web site I would want, and the party web site the State Party would want are different things. I don’t doubt that or even mind it in many ways, but having a functional web site would be a big bonus.

Unfortunately, I think the problem is more than just not knowing what to put up there, but a lack of any idea how the Party couuld even use such a thing. It doesn’t need to be a neato Dean is going to take over the world from the net thing–and I’ve pointed out how before.

It wouldn’t involve a flood of annoying voters or anything like that, but it would provide a resource for the Party to reach out at the same time controlling message and the sort.

100 out of 100.