312.321.2417

“Sen. Obama, time to call us about Rezko: (312) 321-2417,” Chicago Sun-Times, March 6, 2008:

Jury selection began Monday in the trial of political influence peddler Tony Rezko. This would be the time — before a single witness takes the stand — for Barack Obama to finally share every detail of his relationship with Rezko. [...]

For months, Sun-Times investigative reporters have had a standing request to meet with Obama, face to face, to get answers to questions such as these:

•   How many fund-raisers did Rezko throw for Obama?

•   Obama is donating $150,000 to charity that Rezko brought into the campaign. But how much in all did Rezko raise?

•   Did Rezko find jobs for Obama backers in the Blagojevich administration or elsewhere?

•   Why did Obama only recently admit — after Bloomberg News broke the story — that Rezko had toured his South Side mansion with him in 2004 before he bought it?

Dribs and drabs of people’s lives have a most unfortunate way of coming out in trials.

Ouch. These reporters and their questions, not to mention the snark in that last sentence. BELOW THE FOLD, there are cut-to-the-quick observations in “The fight is far from over” from the New Statemen on Mr. Obama’s problems (R.e.z.k.o. and much more).

Now here’s more from across the pond, via Martin Fletcher of the UK’s Times, who has some answers to his own questions, in “Q&A: Barack Obama and Tony Rezko.” The question and answer about Iraqi millionaire Nadhmi Auchi, in particular, may interest readers since it is Larry Johnson who has done much of the reporting and analyzing on Rezko’s shady involvements with Auchi. See Larry’s article, “Will Rezko Blow Up Obama?.”   

Where does Nadhmi Auchi fit in?

Mr Rezko ended up in prison in January for violating bail by failing to declare a $3.5 million loan from Nadhmi Auchi, a British-Iraqi billionaire who was convicted of corruption in the Elf scandal in France in 2003. Mr Auchi was involved with Mr Rezko in a pizzeria business in the Midwest as well as a 62-acre property development in Chicago, and had lent millions of dollars to him.

An earlier $3.5 million dollar loan to Mr Rezko was made only weeks before Mrs Rezko bought the garden next to the Obamas’ new house. Mr Auchi says the loan was for business reasons.

You’ll find more Auchi-related NoQuarter stories here.

Read all of Martin Fletcher’s questions and answers — it’s good background on the story.

Here’s Andrew Stephen of the New Statesman (he is also a BBC contributor), in “The fight is far from over“:

With Hillary Clinton apparently set for victory in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island Andrew Stephen reports on her reinvigorated campaign and the tarnish now on Barack Obama’s sheen

It was all so tragic for Senator Barack Obama. … [...]

Most damaging of all for his campaign, though, was the realisation that St Barack was not above telling fibs and using underhand campaign tactics; if you assiduously cultivate an image of unadulterated rectitude and honour, then the fall from grace is going to be that much greater. Instead of the soaring oratory from Obama to which television viewers had become accustomed, last Monday they saw instead a petulantly defensive candidate trying to explain that he had not lied over his North American Free Trade Agreement policy or his ties to Antoine “Tony” Rezko - a Syrian-born property developer in Chicago whose trial for fraud and attempted extortion had, propitiously, begun that very day. [...]

Doubts over Senator Obama’s integrity were thus clearly planted. Imitating his rhetoric, Clinton also found, got under his skin. “I could just stand up here and say [that] the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect,” she rhapsodised to supporters in Rhode Island. In the week before last Tuesday’s elections, her campaign produced a television ad depicting her, as president, receiving news of a crisis at three am - subliminally suggesting that Obama would not be capable of dealing with grave national security matters.

That was immediately followed by a second ad, claiming that “as chair of a committee that oversees the force fighting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Obama was too busy to hold even ONE hearing on Afghanistan.” The Obama campaign, which spent twice as much as Clinton on television and radio ads in Ohio and Texas, immediately retaliated by putting out its own, almost identical three am ad - saying that “when that call gets answered, shouldn’t the president be the one, the only one, who had [the] judgement and courage to oppose the Iraq war from the start?”

But the belligerence of the Clinton ad forced the US media - which will not look back on its initial worshipful coverage of Senator Obama as its finest era - to put St Barack under a scrutiny to which he had not been subjected before, even re-visiting some of his later more equivocal statements on Iraq. Instead of hearing cable news anchormen like 62-year-old Chris Matthews of MSNBC gushing that when he heard Obama “I felt this thrill going up my leg…this is the New Testament,” newsmen and women started investigating whether Obama was being truthful when he implied to Senator Clinton in a televised debate last January that his ties with Rezko were limited to five hours’ work as a lawyer working for a church.

Readers of the NS were aware last 10 January that Obama’s relationship with Rezko was much deeper, but I suspect that 99 per cent of the US electorate knew nothing of it until just before last Tuesday: that Rezko and Obama had been close friends for a quarter of a century, that Rezko was Obama’s biggest fundraiser, and that the two were involved in a complicated and still-unexplained property deal in which they bought adjoining mansions on the same day and which supposedly brought Obama $300,000 profit. “I’ve never done any favours for [Rezko],” Obama told the Chicago Tribune last December, apparently overlooking letters of support for Rezko’s $14m project he had written as an Illinois state senator in 1998.

In American politics, it is invariably the cover-up rather than the initial deed which brings down politicians. In what is already being called “Naftagate,” Obama silenced Clinton in a televised debate in Ohio by promising to “use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage” to re-negotiate Nafta. Canadian television then reported that, shortly afterwards, the Obama campaign had privately assured the Canadian government that Senator Obama’s statement in the debate was just “political positioning” and should not be taken seriously.

Dr Susan Rice, one of Obama’s top foreign policy advisers (and no relation to Condoleezza), soon emphatically denied the report: “There [has] been no such contact. There [have] been no discussions on Nafta.” Obama himself then told WKYC-TV in Ohio that “I think it’s important for viewers to understand that [the report] was not true” and that “it did not happen.” But on what turned out to be Black Monday for Obama, the Associated Press reported that it had obtained a 1,300-word memo repudiating Obama’s denials and confirming that Obama’s senior economic adviser had indeed met Canadian officials last 8 February, telling them that Obama’s anti-Nafta stance was “more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.” …

Read all — there’s much more — of “The fight is far from over.”

And stay tuned. I’ll be adding more Rezko stories as I get a chance to read them. You do the same in the comments below.