UPDATE: Halperin basically jacks my headline, word for word. Maybe he's a reader?
In a major development in a story sure to be used as a smear-by-association by the RNC against Obama, the defendant Tony Rezko defends Obama by flatly stating that he was totally uninvolved with Barack Obama or Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
However, it seems more likely that this is another case of manipulating prosecutors, a la Siegelman and others, to use the machinery of the state to screw GOP political opponents?
Could the DOJ have done this to smear Senator Obama?? Their track record is certainly suggestive...
From Ben Smith
(Rezko) accuses prosecutors of pressuring him to incriminate Obama:
Your Honor, the prosecutors have been overzealous in pursuing a crime that never happened. They are pressuring me to tell them the "wrong" things that I supposedly know about Governor Blagojevich and Senator Obama. I have never been party to any wrongodoing that involved the Governor or the Senator. I will never fabricate lies about anyone else for selfish purposes.
link to Rezko's letter
His conviction was thought to have badly damaged Blagojevich and cast his political future in doubt; the trial hardly touched Obama.
Although it seems unlike Patrick Fitzgerald, Rezko seems to have been heavily, perhaps illegally pressured by the US Attorney's office to name Obama as a participant in wrongdoing:
The U.S. Attorney's office declined comment in the Tribune piece on the letter, and it's worth keeping in mind that Rezko's case doesn't fit into the pattern of reportedly political federal prosecutions: The U.S. Attorney in Chicago is Patrick Fitzgerald, not a man whose taking his guidance from Karl Rove.
If the GOP uses this, it could potentially hurt them badly and expose them as the criminal cabal that they are once again.
I would also remind folks that the Chicago Sun-Times has suggests that Rove attempted to interfere with the case:
"What I anticipate Mr. Ata would testify to would be that he did actually have direct conversations with Mr. Rezko about the fact that . . . Mr. Kjellander was working with Karl Rove to have Mr. Fitzgerald removed," Hamilton told U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve. Hamilton said Rezko told Ata: "Mr. Kjellander is working with Mr. Rove to have Mr. Fitzgerald removed so that someone else can come in to the U.S. attorney's office."
A White House spokesman referred questions to Rove's lawyer. Rove, through Washington attorney Robert Luskin, and Kjellander denied they sought to oust Fitzgerald, Chicago's corruption-busting U.S. attorney, who remains in his post.