Governor's arrest: Car doors, footsteps
December 9, 2008 at 2:34 PM | Comments (0)
Just minutes before 6 a.m. today, a pair of black sedans and an SUV raced up Richmond Street toward the personal residence of Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Sunnyside Avenue on Chicago's Northwest Side.
About the same time, the phone inside Blagojevich's home began to ring.
On the other end was Robert Grant, the FBI's special agent in charge in Chicago. Two agents were outside Blagojevich's front door with a warrant for his arrest, he announced to the governor.
"Well, I woke him up," Grant recalled later Tuesday at a news conference to announce charges of fraud and bribery against Blagojevich. "The first thing [Blagojevich said] was, 'Was this a joke?'."
Grant asked the governor to quietly open the door "without the media finding out about it, without waking the children," he said. "He was very cooperative, and that's it."
Reporters and photographers for the Tribune, which had recently broken several stories about the expanding federal investigation of the governor and his administration, were also in the neighborhood and witnessed some of the activities outside the home.
The two sedans and SUV pulled up to the curb in front of Blagojevich's Mediterranean-style bungalow beside several vehicles already stationed there--the security detail for the governor and his family.
It was still dark outside, with the sun not rising for at least another hour, and a heavy rain was falling.
For at least the next 20 minutes, officers in several vehicles got in and out of their vehicles and moved them to a different part of the block. The vehicles could be seen moving back and forth, changing positions on the streets around the house, parking in the governor's driveway and even parking down an alley adjacent to Blagojevich's home.
The FBI took the governor into custody without incident and, indeed, without being seen. Grant said the FBI's approach was not only designed to avoid media attention but also to avoid waking up the governor's two daughters.
"They [the kids] did not wake up that I know of," Grant told reporters. "They were beginning to stir as we left, but they were not awake and not aware. But his wife [Patricia] was awake."
Grant said during the arrest that agents handcuffed Blagojevich, calling that "normal standard practice for us." But he reiterated that the governor was cooperative throughout.
Grant acknowledged it is unusual for the FBI to arrest a governor at his home. Most elected officials are allowed to turn themselves in rather than be suddenly awakened in the pre-dawn hours.
But Grant said the FBI chose to arrest the governor in this fashion because it was the best step for the ongoing federal investigation.
"We have a lot of things we learned from this wiretap, a lot of things that we learned from these microphones," Grant said of the surveillance conducted by federal agents as part of the probe. "So it wasn't about ... tying this in a bow, waiting until spring, letting things be done that damaged the State of Illinois, damaged the United State Senate, hurt people. It was about what is good for the investigation, what is good to find out the truth about what is going on, because this goes beyond just the governor. It goes to other people who were involved in these schemes."
-- John Chase
What did Obama know, and when did he know it?
ReplyDelete