Goliath. It is a david and goliath battle that identify been fortunate enough now to be out on the other side and talk a little bit about. That was the reality i stepped into on december 9 2008, when at 6 21 in the morning the doorbell would not stop ringing where i was staying. I was fund raising for my brother. Id committed to doing it at least for four months. The doorbell continued to ring. I thought it was just someone playing pranks. Got dressed very quickly, went downstairs and saw two men flashing fbi badges and subpoenas requesting entrance many to friends of blagojevich. You can imagine that was a shocking occurrence for me, and it forever changed my life and took me in a direction i never expected. Later that morning the thenu. S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in a press Conference Announcing that my brother had been arrested said that lincoln would roll over in his grave if he knew that rod was attempting to sell Barack Obamas senate seat to highest bidder. As i was listening to that, it was a many of the surreal moments that i lived through it was a complete opposite of what i experienced working with my brother. I had no, i had no basis to understand what he was talking about. While he spoke he referred to fundraiser a several times, and we also later on read the criminal complaint where fundraiser a was mentioned almost more than 30 timings. And as i listened and read i realized he was talking about me. And that was clearly what set the course of my life into a direction that brings me here today. I got a call from a very good, beloved family friend sheldon, who suggested that anytime youre mentioned in a criminal complaint, a federal criminal complaint, you better get a lawyer. And so he had given me the names of a number of them and i quickly began to think through what my next steps were. The man who i ultimately chose to defend me, michael etingier, and i get at chappys in skokie on december 17th at 5 30. Mike had told me his wife maureen was not cooking dinner, so he was going to eat his dipper, and asked dinner, and asked me if i wanted to eat something. By that time i had lost what robust appetite i used to have and only drank coffee. I consider myself a fairly sophisticated guy. I served in the military, i was an executive in the Financial Services industry and had dealt with corporate attorneys regularly in nashville and other places in the country who were buttoned up, never swore, always polite. And as i sat talking to mike, as ill now refer to him he began to school me on what it was like to be in the bulls eye of the federal government. And he quickly changed. Any naive impression that i thought that i could just go in and try to clean up and explain this absolutely humongous misunderstanding that had been announced days before. And i was prepared to proffer that is to submit to a an interview with the fbi and turn over all the subpoenaed documents. And he stared at me and looked at me with the intensity that i came to know and almost love saying that, if i defend you youre not going to plead. Youre going to the plead the fifth. Which, when i heard that, it, again how naive i was i responded to him to say that only guilty people plead. That was what i thought. Only people, guilty people pled. And he convinced me very strongly not to do that. He also told me that the government the federal government was not seeking truth, they were out to win. And that i should be prepared for them to to use any means possible if i was indicted to try to convict me, discredit me, do whatever they could to emotionally or physically wear me down not to mention legally. While mike was schooling me on the federal system, he was eating scrambled eggs, sausage and hash browns. Ill never forget this. So heres this very intense very energetic passionate man telling me that the government is not my friend eating scrambled eggs. And while he was talking to me, a little yellow piece of scrambled egg was hanging on his lip that i couldnt stop staring at [laughter] and im wondering, what who is this guy . I mean hes nothing like the lawyers id dealt with. And had to quickly conclude that maybe criminal defense is a completely different professional approach to things. And that was, that was without a doubt the most important decision of my life to choose Michael Ettinger as my attorney. Mike is here today with us. Hes been acknowledged. Cheryl schroeder our second chair, is here. Cheryl would you raise your hand . [applause] our third chair is here [applause] and let me tell you, they are toughest women i have ever met who have the greatest compassion a defendant could ever want to have. And they all became personal friends of mine and i considered them throughout this thing my Guardian Angels. Because without them, it would be hard for me to give you this talk today. I was indicted in april of 2008 on a very vague 28word statute that alleged that i had violated, in conspiring with my brother, their right to his Honest Services. The law was so vague that there were three cases that were heard during our prep for trial and during trial that the Supreme Court agreed the hear them. In an attempt and there are so many ways that i can explain to you how the government i believe played with my life, one of the things that was done by the u. S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to hedge his bets in the event Honest Services was deemed unconstitutional, he added three more charges to our challenges; conspiracy to extort conspiracy to bribe and extortion. And the only question i have to ask is if i had done all those things why wasnt i charged to begin with, andpj an array of prosecutors, irs fbi and any resource available from the United States government against the defendant. It is an absolute unfair fight. And i can get into a lot more detail on that but i wont to give you my view of why it is so lopsided in favor of the government. I remember standing there in front of the judge next to my brother, both of us pleading not guilty to our chargings thinking about our our charges, thinking about our parents who would have probably been shocked, of course and overwhelmed by what was happening to her sons to their sons. And well never forget will never forget that moment for as long as i live as well. Let me just give you a little insight into how these arraignments go. I was finger printed and mug shotted twice. U. S. Marshals and the fbi. And right after the arraignment, i went to visit my pretrial case officer who i went to see after i was arraigned and turned over my passport, had to surrender my passport and my weapons that i owned, which i didnt so it was an easy thing to produce for him and give them Financial Data that i thought was private and personal, but mike suggested that i tell them everything that i had. You have no idea again how it feels to have to tell strangers all the personal details of your life, especially financial believing that they might use it all against you. But thats kind of how it goes in federal court. As we were wrapping up i thought i could go on and get back with my attorneys, and he handed me this plastic cup. And that plastic cup he said, i need a sample. Were not done yet i need a sample. So we went to the mens room. Ands this would have been the more and this is one of the more absurd memories i had, and i had to laugh. When i walked into the mens room now i was in the army. We did what we called piss tests all the time, and i had to do it myself. It was really no big deal. But you walk boo there the commodes in the corner and there are floor to ceiling mirrors around the commode to make sure that you dont slip a false sample in there. Well, the case officer in a true show of humanity to me turned his back so that i could give my sample. And after the trial i called him, and he was, i think, very surprised to hear from me and thanked him for that very kind gesture that, you know, after all these years i have to laugh about, and im, you know, i share with you now as one of absurdities of my experience. A few days after that arraignment mike d Michael Ettinger, got a call from the lead prosecutor, reid shar. He was offering a global solution. He said, weve got the governor. Your guy can win have brothers talk. And, of course having never been federally indicted and used to things being fairly black and white in my life, i asked mike very angrily why did they, expletive, indict me if they thought i could win . He said, forget about that, thats not the issue now. What i said, what does it mean . They want you to talk to your brother and discuss a solution between the two of you to come back to the prosecutors with a Family Commitment to possibly this is possibly work out a plea agreement. And that was just so appalling to me that i quickly told mike no were going to go to trial. Im not going to plead. I didnt do anything wrong. And my brother and i never, i never brought it up to my brother never asked him to do anything. And, you know, if he ever reads book hell find a lot of the things that i had to deal with that the government threw my way trying to use me to get him. All along way i felt that the government was playing with my life. Very cynically keeping me involved throughout the entire process. Months late arer i asked mike later i asked mike to file a severance on my behalf. It was forecasted the trial was going the take six months and the thought of being away from them home for six months and having to be on trial for six months was going to be a major hardship personal and financial, that it was just as a businessman a fairly reasonable request to say sever me. Mike said my trial alone would have probably taken two weeks a substantial reduction in cost. And that, to me, was the cleanest most logical thing that, to me, made sense. Mike reluctantly submitted that severance request because he felt i would be in better legal shape if i were on trial with my brother as opposed to opposed to him, as not. I thought a shorter two week trial would save me a lot of money, and we submitted it to the prosecutors and the judge. The prosecutors opposed it, the judge denied it and we went on to trial. Our trial actually did last two and a half months not six. But nonetheless, it was a major financial hardship. Let me give you some facts. I cant ive fundraised for my brother four months. I never not one time, conditioned a contribution in exchange for a government favor or contract. One of my favorite phrases was i dont do that, no. You have no idea how i was how people nibble around you as a fundraiser trying to get things in return, and i never came even close to accepting anything and ill get into a little bit more detail on that shortly. So we were wiretapped for 50 days. 400 hours. Roughly 4,000 intercepts 1500 on my personal cell phone and 284 personal conversations i had with my wife and son. Let me give you an embarrassing example of one of those wiretap conversations that involved my son, alex. And i told him i was going to tell today and its also in the book. But with i think it illustrates how sloppy our federal government is in protecting our civil liberties. So alex called me this particular day. We were being wiretapped. And we were just talking about father and son stuff. It was not a conspiratorial conversation, and the fbi is supposed to follow minimization rules when theyre eavesdropping. Which is what i call it as opposed to intercepting or surveilling. And they didnt do it in this conversation. And to this day, after hearing many of them, there were so many of them that they sloppily did not minimize. But you could hear alex urinating in the toilet. And if that wasnt a signal to the agent who was surveilling us to minimize and turn off the tap, flushing of the toilet would have made it very clear to him or her what was going on. And i share that with you now because i can laugh about it, and its funny. But the first time julie heard our voices, because she she dutifully did a lot of the transcribing, listening to those conversations and writing them down so our legal team could have that, as did robin did a lot of heavy lifting transcribing these conversations she broke down emotionally, and it took her a couple of weeks to recover from the shock and horror of hearing her voice talking with her husband and her son about stuff that no one has any business to listen to. But fortunately shes recovered enough that shes resumed her life but not Strong Enough to be here while im promoting a book. Shes still a little bit spooked. At heart of everything that happened to me was what i call the approach. I was approached by two men that were representing congressman Jesse Jackson jr. They were in the indian community, the south asian community. Very unsophisticated guys, i thought. And came to me saying that they would, in order to assist congressman jackson to be considered and awarded the senate seat, one guy offered 1. 5 million, and the other man offered 6 million. Each time i told them rod is going to do the right thing for the people of illinois. Its not about money and i seriously doubt that hed ever appoint congressman Jesse Jackson to anything. A third conversation that i had with the gentleman from that community was one that was wiretapped and surveilled. He had come to me to speak to me at the friends of blagojevich Campaign Office where i hung out fundraising and he alerted me to what these two gentlemen were talking about in the indian community, and he was concerned about bad things happening. And he was right. I had told him and you could hear it on wiretap and the fbi and the department of justice heard me telling him that rod was again going to do the right thing for the people of illinois and it wasnt about money. I stressed it wasnt about money twice so he understood it. And i can tell you, if you went through all the wiretaps, all through the discovery of the 302s that were the reports of the investigations of witnesses and centers of influence that the government interviewed, theres no one who ever said anything that was harmful to me many any way. If anything, it was quite the opposite. Which even to this day i keep asking, and you be the judge why was i indicted . What we did learn from discovery, and discovery is a dump of information the prosecution has gathered that is required by law to provide to the defense. We learned in reading the fbi 302 reports that i remember, weve turned all of this stuff back in to the u. S. Attorneys office. I read the 302 reports on roger nyack and [inaudible] roger nyack in particular was particularly interesting to me because he said under oath to the fbi that he had met with congressman jackson early in october of 2008. These gentlemen approached me on october 28th and 31st of that same year. That he had had a conversation with congressman jackson and congressman jackson was encouraging him to come talk to us about money in and the senate seat. And he believed that if he were in the senate because it was you know, possibilities of rod being, you know, indicted on something at some point. I think rod lived with that daily. That he would be very close to the future president and help rod get a pardon which was, to me one of the most absurd and many absurd things i read many those 302s. But it was very clear to me that congressman jackson was the man who empowered these two emissaries to come talk to us about the United States senate seat. And it is my view that congressman jackson was allowed to get away with a federal crime because the u. S. Attorney and the fbi knew all of this from their interviews of witnesses and the people in the center of this. There was one other thing that i recall from the 302s that i found very interesting. There was a and this was out of roger nyacks report where he told the agent that congressman jackson was concerned about the conversations that they had and he had called nyack asking nyack if hed talked to them about money. Well, he had, and he said he did, and jackson told him according to nyack dont talk about money anymore. I hear that blagojevich is being investigated okay . So what can i conclude logically from that is congressman jackson was tipped off by someone that there was an investigation going on of my brother and protected him. Quick highlight from the trial because i know im running out of time, and were going to have a q a period here. [inaudible] okay. [laughter] as a defendant youre its a david and goliath battle. You are up against a superpower. The United States of america. And every time i went into that courtroom, i always felt outnumbered except for my Guardian Angels who i knew were there to help me through it all. But it was just the four of us, basically. During the trial the government still never stopped investigating. I got a call from my nashville cpa two weeks into the trial giving me a heads up that, rob, the irs has just subpoenaed all your tax records from 2003 to 2008 and just wanted you to know that. So not only am i indicted, not only did they add on three more felony charges that put me in further legal jeopardy and facing a penalty of who knows how many additional more years if i was convicted theyre still chasing me, looking at my tax returns. And what we learned during that trial, that they had contacted all organizations that we had made charitable contributions to; vanderbilt university, the ymca nashville, the Red Cross University of tampa. They all got calls verifying that what i had contributed was accurate. They could not find anything in my tax returns to discredit me because thats all they had. And i discovered that even during the trial while i was being crossexamined by the prosecutor that all he had was to try to catch me in logic loops and get me to Say Something that i didnt intend to say and wear me down. And because they had nothing of legal substance other than trying to connect dots from these wiretaps that they had on us. And they could again do whatever they wanted to do and they indicted me. While i was testifying, i testified for two days. Two of the most challenging days of my life. Mike cheryl robin prepared me as well as anyone could be prepared to testify. You sit up there in this courtroom. It was packed. Strangers. No very few friends mostly strangers and the enemy lined up staring at you waiting for you to screw up. United states government, of all things, my enemy. The whole process of testifying wears you down. That would have been a tragic had i not disciplined myself to listen to the question an