Desperation is an ugly thing

Rico says that Blagojevich is going to hang but, according to an article by Susan Carey and Douglas Belkin in The Wall Street Journal, he's trying desperately not to:

Governor Rod Blagojevich's attorney told lawmakers he will submit President-elect Barack Obama's internal report on communications with the Illinois governor to the House impeachment committee. Attorney Ed Genson hopes the report will support Mr. Blagojevich's claims that the governor did nothing wrong in his handling of Mr. Obama's vacant Senate seat.
Last week, Mr. Obama released the internal report that supported his insistence that there had been no inappropriate contact with the governor's office by the president elect or his staff. The committee is scheduled to convene today. The committee last week rejected Mr. Genson's request to subpoena incoming Obama administration chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, whose testimony he said would also bolster Gov. Blagojevich's claims of innocence. Mr. Genson's defense comes a day after Illinois Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn said he expects Mr. Blagojevich to be impeached by the Illinois House and convicted by the state Senate, clearing the way for a special election in June to fill the Senate seat vacated by Mr. Obama.
Mr. Quinn, speaking on CBS News' Face the Nation, said he hopes Mr. Blagojevich will be out of office by 12 February, when the state will celebrate the bicentennial birthday of Abraham Lincoln. The lieutenant governor added that he hopes Mr. Blagojevich will voluntarily resign. Either way, according to state law, Mr. Quinn would take over as acting governor.
Mr. Blagojevich was arrested on 9 December on federal corruption charges alleging, among other things, that he conspired to sell Mr. Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder. The governor has denied wrongdoing, said he will fight the charges and has given no indication he plans to leave office.
An Illinois House committee already is considering a possible impeachment of Mr. Blagojevich, and is slated to take up the matter again Monday. If the House acts to impeach, the matter would move to a trial in the Illinois Senate, where two-thirds of the members would have to vote to convict the governor. Mr. Quinn said Sunday that he thinks "far more" than two-thirds of the state senators are prepared to do so. Mr. Quinn said Sunday that if he becomes acting governor, he would press the Legislature to pass a bill that would allow a temporary appointee to fill Mr. Obama's vacant Senate seat ahead of a special state election in June on a successor, ensuring that Illinois "has two senators at all times."
According to the Associated Press, Illinois Representative Barbara Flynn Currie, head of the impeachment committee, said last week that the governor's attorney, Edward Genson, asked her committee to subpoena two incoming Obama advisers, Valerie Jarrett and Rahm Emanuel, along with more than a dozen other individuals.
But U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald asked the committee not to subpoena Ms. Jarrett, who has been tapped to be a senior adviser to the president-elect, or Mr. Emanuel, the incoming chief of staff, to avoid interfering in the criminal investigation of Mr. Blagojevich that Mr. Fitzgerald is overseeing. Ms. Currie said last week that she didn't know how her committee would respond to Mr. Genson's request. She said Mr. Fitzgerald has denied the panel's request to interview a list of people named in the criminal complaint against the governor.
Last week the Obama transition team released a report denying any wrongdoing or improper communication between the Obama camp and Mr. Blagojevich and his aides about a potential replacement for the president-elect's Senate seat. "There were conversations," David Axelrod, Mr. Obama's senior adviser, said Sunday on NBC News' Meet the Press. "There was no discussion of a quid pro quo."
Transcripts of the US Attorney's Office wiretaps of Mr. Blagojevich "are in their possession," said Mr. Axelrod. "They're not in our possession. When they are released, when and if they are released, they will completely bear out our report." For now, he added, "we're sort of innocent bystanders in this process."
Mr. Quinn, the lieutenant governor, said the fact that the federal prosecutor has declined to release investigative information to the impeachment committee won't stand in the way of a vote to end the governor's tenure. "There is so much other evidence the impeachment committee has considered," he said.

Rico says he wishes Rod would just bow out gracefully, but he's a politician, so he won't...