Third Parties Negotiate with Blagojevich Using Jackson’s Name and new video of JJJ
By LisaB on December 12, 2008 at 4:41 PM in Current Affairs
Today’s Chicago Tribune has more on the activities of people who claim they were acting on behalf of Jesse Jackson, Jr with disgraced IL governor Rod Blagojevich. Even as Jackson denies involvement, some threads are unravelling.
Jackson has denied direct contact with Blagojevich about Obama’s senate seat and has denied sending any emissaries. This story, though, points to business contacts in common between Blagojevich and Jackson. Whether they were running their own private deal or our working on behalf of a specific party remains unknown.
As Gov. Rod Blagojevich was trying to pick Illinois’ next U.S. senator, businessmen with ties to both the governor and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. discussed raising at least $1 million for Blagojevich’s campaign as a way to encourage him to pick Jackson for the job, the Tribune has learned.
Read the rest ->
Blagojevich made an appearance at an Oct. 31 luncheon meeting at the India House restaurant in Schaumburg sponsored by Oak Brook businessman Raghuveer Nayak, a major Blagojevich supporter who also has fundraising and business ties to the Jackson family, according to several attendees and public records.Two businessmen who attended the meeting and spoke to the Tribune on the condition of anonymity said that Nayak and Blagojevich aide Rajinder Bedi privately told many of the more than two dozen attendees the fundraising effort was aimed at supporting Jackson’s bid for the Senate.
——————-Blagojevich and the congressman met to discuss the Senate seat on Monday, one day before federal prosecutors arrested Blagojevich and charged him with trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.
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One said Nayak [a political and community leader in Chicago's Indian community who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Blagojevich and $22,000 for Jackson] and Bedi [managing director for the Illinois Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity's Office of Trade and Investment and referred to by Blagojevich as "My Sikh warrior"] told him and others of their plan to help Jackson.The second said he overheard Nayak and Bedi discussing plans with Bhatt, the Joliet pharmacist.
“Raghu said he needed to raise a million for Rod to make sure Jesse got the seat,” the second businessman said. “He said, ‘I can raise half of it, $500,000.’ The idea was that the other two would help raise the rest.”
Bhatt, whose two Basinger’s Pharmacy outlets were searched by the FBI last week, has been the focus of a state and federal investigations into whether campaign donations were made in exchange for regulatory favors.
Bhatt is a prominent Indian businessman who helped the state’s top pharmacy regulator win his job. The Tribune reported last year that state pharmacy auditors probing allegations of Medicaid fraud at Basinger’s complained that their bosses thwarted the investigation, allegations Bhatt has adamantly denied in interviews with the Tribune.
In addition to direct fundraising, both Nyak and Bedi tried to convince another Blagojevich fundraiser, Patel Babu, to “us his influence to get the governor to appoint Jesse Jackson to the Senate” according to another source at the Oct 31 meeting.
It’s beginning to look like some “concerned citizens” were doing their best to help convince Blagojevich to appoint Jackson or to broker a deal between the two. Maybe Jackson wasn’t willing to do direct fundraising on Blagojevich’s behalf, but some of his supporters were.
In the Sun-Times was a more general article rehashing information from the complaint. The complaint contained an assertion by Blagojevich that Senate Candidate 5 indirectly approached him with promises to raise funds for him if Candidate 5 were given Obama’s seat.
“In a recorded conversation on October 31, 2008, Rod Blagojevich described an earlier approach by an associate of Senate Candidate 5 as follows: ‘We were approached “pay to play.” That, you know, he’d raise me 500 grand. An emissary came. Then the other guy would raise a million, if I made him [Senate Candidate 5] a senator,’ ” the complaint states.
Some people have asserted that this was bombast on Blagojevich’s part, but remember what was in the Tribune?
“Raghu said he needed to raise a million for Rod to make sure Jesse got the seat,” the second businessman said. “He said, ‘I can raise half of it, $500,000.’ The idea was that the other two would help raise the rest.”
Go and read the Chicago Tribune story. It’s very interesting and worth your time. Were these supporters acting on their own while throwing around Jackson’s name? Jackson insists that is the case. We will see.
The new narrative about Blagojevich is that he’s somehow unstable or given to grandiosity. He may be, but clearly he was also a man on a mission to secure his future. I think his words on that wiretap may have been more accurate than first reported.
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UPDATE:
JJJ says Blagojevich may have a “mental capacity issue.”
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, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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