WHY DID OBAMA PAY A CRIMINAL $64k FOR A TINY STRIP OF LAND?

[NRO]

Barack Obama’s friend and fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko was found guilty today of mail fraud, wire fraud, soliciting bribes, and money laundering in connection to a federal investigation into political corruption in the state of Illinois. Rezko now faces sentencing on 16 of 24 counts, some of which carry punishments of up to 20 years in prison.

Steven Spruiell thinks that Barack Obama is guilty “of maintaining a close relationship with Rezko long after it had become clear that Rezko’s primary business was buying and selling political influence for personal gain.” Spruiell writes:

“The following fact pattern was out in the open long before Obama severed his
ties to Rezko (sometime in late 2006): In 1983, Rezko started raising a lot of
money for Chicago politicians. In 1989, he and his partner Daniel Mahru started
vacuuming up deals with the city to develop low-income housing, despite having
virtually zero experience in the field. They proceeded to obtain over $100
million in city, state, and federal grants and bank loans to develop 30 run-down
properties into affordable-housing projects, earning $6.9 million for
themselves. By 2007, the city had sued them numerous times for failing to heat
these properties; over half of the properties had fallen into foreclosure, and
six of them were boarded up.”Obama helped put one of these deals together during
his time as a junior associate at Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland. Other
lawyers at Davis Miner helped Rezko acquire half of the properties that fell
into disrepair. And many of these properties were located in the district Obama
represented as an Illinois state senator. Nonetheless, Obama told the Chicago
Sun-Times that he was unaware of Rezko’s growing reputation as a slumlord until
he read Sun-Times reporter Tim Novak’s two-part
series on the subject. So we are to believe (yet again) that Obama was the last
person to know what one of his longtime friends was up to.

“Even if Obama can claim plausible deniability about the deteriorating shape of Rezko’s slums, he faces a more difficult challenge in explaining why he entered into a
real-estate deal with Rezko after the Chicago papers had run over 100 stories
about the clouds gathering over Rezko’s head. When the Obamas were looking for a
new house in the summer of 2005, Rezko helped them buy their dream home by purchasing an adjoining lot they could not afford, then selling them a strip of the land on which they wanted to build a fence.”

“Obama may have thought all of his interactions with Rezko were above-board, but they weren’t. One of the counts against Rezko detailed how he funneled the proceeds of an illegal kickback scheme into Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign. Rezko’s co-conspirator, a former trustee of the Illinois Teachers Retirement System (TRS) named Stuart Levine, told the jury that he directed the TRS to invest $50 million with a firm called Glencoe Capital. In exchange, Levine arranged for himself and Rezko to be paid a fraudulent $500,000 “finder’s fee.” Levine routed Rezko’s half to an associate named Joseph Aramanda in March of 2004. That month, Aramanda wrote a $10,000 check to Barack Obama’s campaign.”

It will be interesting to see, now that Rezko is facing 16 years in prison, whether the Chicago financier and convicted swindler will try to roll on his old friend Barack Obama in exchange for a reduction in his sentence. If that happens, this could be an interesting presidential election season indeed.