More FitzBlago History, from the Chicago Sun-Times —The past is past, but not completely. A check through some
newly relevant old newspaper articles reveals that U.S. Attorney Patrick
Fitzgerald in Chicago weighed in publicly
against Blagojevich during the political race
that made Rod Blagojevich governor.

The federal office in the Northern District of Illinois
(NDIL) has had a reputation for tight lip and close vest, but recent leaks and
other recent problems show a different and disturbing pattern: First came the exaggeratedly
publicized splashy arrest, rather than indictment, of a sitting governor; the charging document as vehicle for verbatim/edited quotation
from embarrassing conversations caught by wiretap; the oddly polemical press
conference in which both prosecutor and FBI inveighed against the defendant; then
leaks to the Wall Street Journal from sources close to the investigation, blaming or faulting
the Chicago Tribune for the timing of
the arrest. (Yesterday, in an incident unrelated to the Blagojevich matter, a
lengthy email sent to a mailing list of reporters by the NDIL included the
names of witnesses in another case; the names were redacted in the complaint to
which the list was