US Attorneys stopped a political crime spree in Illinois. Now it could restart.
Rod Blagojevich’s pardon puts decades of anti-corruption work at risk
Jim Thompson, who served as the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (1971-1975), and Governor of Illinois (1977-1991). Source: State of Illinois
Earlier this week, Donald Trump pardoned former Illinois Governor and human weasel Rod Blagojevich. Blagojevich went to prison for (among other things) shaking down the CEO of a children’s hospital for campaign contributions and attempting to auction off the Senate seat vacated by then President-Elect Barack Obama. Here’s the audio of Blagojevich telling an advisor: “I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden… I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing.”
When US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald announced the charges against Blagojevich, he declared that he had acted to stop the governor in the middle of a “political corruption crime spree.” Trump had previously commuted Blagojevich’s sentence. His pardon, coupled with the decision to drop charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, sends a bleak signal that the federal government can no longer be a reliable partner in the fight against corruption.
50 years of progress
Blagojevich’s actions are often seen as the low point for political corruption in Illinois. But his indictment represented a throwback to a prior era of politics. Since 1973, four Illinois Governors have gone to prison. Blagojevich was the last. Significant progress has been made at the city as well. None of the last three mayors have faced anything close to the allegations outlined in the hired truck scandal that felled Mayor Richard M. Daley’s budget director and political patronage director.1
Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago show that that by the 2010s, federal corruption convictions had fallen to almost half of the levels seen in the 1990s. We still have our share of corruption, but Chicago now looks a lot like other big cities:
Source: Rossi, Gradel and Mackenzie, 2023. “Corruption Convictions Trend Downward: The State Capitol and Chicago City Hall Are Still Hotbeds of Criminal Activity.” University of Illinois at Chicago.
We don’t spend enough time on good news around here, but this graph represents genuine progress. It also didn’t happen by accident.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon appointed a young, ambitious US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois to take on the Democratic machine.2 Jim Thompson started by sending former Governor Otto Kerner (the first of the Illinois four) to prison. He followed that up with forty indictments for voter fraud in the 1972 primary and set up a public corruption unit in partnership with the Internal Revenue Service to go after the machine full-time.3
In 1974, Thompson convicted Alderman Tom Keane, a close ally of the mayor and chair of the powerful Finance Committee, on corruption charges, along with the Ald. Paul Wigoda and Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Matt Danaher. The Sun-Times described it as “the most incredible week in Chicago judicial history.”
At the time, Daley had City Council at his beck and call. He had enormous power over the State’s Attorney, County Judges, and local elections via the machine. But he couldn’t do much about the federally appointed Thompson, or about the federal courts that Thompson brought his cases to. As the authors of American Pharoah - the seminal book on Daley’s legacy as mayor - recount, Thompson was Daley’s true political nemesis.
Thompson never charged Daley, but he paved the way for a new approach to politics in Illinois. A series of similarly minded prosecutors followed, working across Democratic and Republican presidential administrations. In the 1980s, four US Attorneys led Operation Greylord, an investigation of the Cook County Courts that resulted in the indictment of 92 individuals and 17 judges. In the 1990s, the Feds unearthed corruption and mafia ties in the construction industry, sending 6 aldermen to prison as part of Operation Silver Shovel. And this week, a federal jury is debating the fate of Michael Madigan, the once supremely powerful Speaker of the Illinois House, and longest-serving legislative leader in US history.
This drumbeat of investigations, coupled with the Shakman decrees that banned political hiring (first issued in 1972, and strengthened in 1979 and 1983), resulted in steady, grinding progress. As the data crunchers at UIC show, convictions spiked during the 1980s and have managed a steady decline since.
Source: Rossi, Gradel and Mackenzie, 2023. “Corruption Convictions Trend Downward: The State Capitol and Chicago City Hall Are Still Hotbeds of Criminal Activity.” University of Illinois at Chicago.
The chart above reflects 50 years of painstaking work. It includes dogged investigations by US Attorneys and federal agents, and a federal court system with a reputation as a fair and unbiased place to try politicians. Federal indictments added teeth to the work of local investigative reporters, and helped ensure that court-mandated reforms like Shakman were followed.
Voters can tune out, and local prosecutors and judges can be subject to local pressures. And while we have reformed ethics rules and policies at the state and local levels, those rules can only go so far. As we’ve discussed here before, tougher process-based constraints on government have their own limitations. The Shakman rules are one of the reasons it takes six months to fill vacancies at the city. Moreover, our goal shouldn’t be more processes to catch corruption – it should be a government that wouldn’t even think of stealing from the public in the first place. Nothing quite clarifies the mind like the prospect of a long stint in federal prison.
A get out of jail free card for corruption
For 50 years, corrupt politicians have had no solution for federal agents, prosecutors and courts. That has changed. Donald Trump has made it clear that if politicians are enthusiastic sycophants, they can expect a get out of jail free card for federal charges.
Politicians across the country have already taken notice. Eric Adams, who was previously indicted for abusing his position for illegal campaign contributions and heavily discounted first-class tickets on Turkish Airlines, quickly realized that his best chance to stay a free man was to kowtow to Donald Trump. He invented a narrative of persecution from the Biden Justice Department, based on conflicts between New York and the Biden Administration over new arrivals. This week, Trump’s Justice Department announced that it was dropping the charges against Adams.
Across the river in New Jersey, former US Senator ‘Gold Bar Bob’ Menendez has just been sentenced to 11 years in prison for bribery, obstruction of justice, extortion and acting as a foreign agent for the Government of Egypt. He is now aping the Blagojevich/Adams strategy. He’s tweeted at the president that “President Trump is right. This process is political and has been corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores integrity to the system.”
This process has already damaged efforts to beat corruption back down into the hole. Painstaking, multi-year investigations have been upended. Stripped of the mission that makes their work valuable, capable prosecutors and investigators will leave for better pay in the private sector.4 And politicians across the country can worry less about remaining accountable to voters and juries, as long as they stay in the good graces of Donald Trump.
It's possible that these four years will be an aberration. But the damage done to ongoing investigations and the credibility of federal prosecutors will be lasting. While Donald Trump is a unique figure in American politics, there’s no guarantee that those who follow will return to the bipartisan consensus on corruption that held for 50 years. Vice President and potential successor JD Vance is already going around attacking the credibility of the courts.
I don’t think that there’s much of a solution for the next few years, although tighter ethics rules at the City and State might help. But it would be nice if the right-wingers who love to rag on Illinois for its corruption reckon with the fact that their guy just torched decades of progress towards a cleaner system.
And when the next election comes around, I hope Democratic candidates for president endorse a constitutional amendment removing the president’s ability to pardon family members, political allies, and individuals acting (or attempting to act) in the president’s interest.5
The past is never the past
50 years might feel like ancient history. But just like the decision to appoint Thompson, the choices we make today will echo for at least another half century. I’m sure the jurors now deliberating in the Madigan trial are paying attention to the events of the last week. What kind of message does it send to them to see this assault on the courts and the US Attorney’s office?
And in some cases, ancient history and contemporary politics come together in the same person.
Ed Burke was first elected to the City Council in 1969, two years before James Thompson stepped into the job of US Attorney. Burke served as an alderman for 54 years. He held Tom Keane’s old seat as chair of the city’s powerful Finance Committee for more than 30. Fond of joking that there were only three ways to leave city hall, “the ballot box, the pine box, or the jury box,” Burke was finally convicted by the feds in 2023 on racketeering, bribery and extortion charges.
Two weeks ago, Ed Burke’s attorneys petitioned Donald Trump to commute his sentence.
The fact that ‘political patronage director’ is no longer a title at City Hall might be another piece of evidence that things have trended in the right direction.
Yes. Our story of political reform and good government starts with Richard Nixon. Go figure.
Likely contrary to Nixon’s wishes, Thompson also went after Republicans, including participating in the investigation of Vice President Spiro Agnew.
If you are one of those capable prosecutors or agents, please try to stay around for the next four years.
The pardons and commutations at the end of Biden’s term included some truly odious cases, including his son Hunter, a judge who took kickbacks to send juveniles to private prisons, and the former Comptroller of Dixon Illinois, who stole $54 million from the town. But Biden’s Justice Department continued prosecutions of Democrats like Adams and Menendez, and his commutations offered a chance to slink into obscurity rather than mug for the cameras. Meanwhile, Blagojevich is rumored to be under consideration to become Ambassador to Serbia.
This article is woefully misinformed.