Obama staff summonsed to testify in graft trial

CHICAGO - Lawyers for former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich have subpoenaed White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel as a witness at his corruption trial starting today.

White House adviser Valerie Jarrett was also subpoenaed.

Blagojevich's racketeering and fraud trial is due to begin with jury selection after 18 months of skirmishing in the federal courts and news media.

The ex-governor, who is accused of trying to sell President Barack Obama's former Senate seat, has pleaded not guilty. He faces 24 charges.

If Emanuel did take the witness stand, he might be asked what effort if any the White House had made to get Blagojevich to appoint Jarrett to the Senate seat.

Neither Emanuel nor Jarrett, who was mentioned as a possible candidate but withdrew her name to become a White House adviser, has been accused of any wrongdoing.

According to the indictment, Blagojevich ordered an associate to pressure Emanuel - then a Chicago congressman - to get his Hollywood agent brother to raise funds.

It says Blagojevich told the associate to threaten to withhold money for a school in Emanuel's congressional district. But there is nothing in the indictment to suggest Emanuel was actually threatened.

Blagojevich and his brother, Nashville businessman Robert Blagojevich, have pleaded not guilty to charges that they schemed to profit from the Governor's power to fill the Senate seat. They have also denied plotting to join with his key advisers to mobilise the powers of the Governor's office to further a moneymaking racketeering scheme.

US District Judge James Zagel turned down a request from Rod Blagojevich's lawyers to delay the trial, telling them to get ready to start picking a jury today.

Blagojevich's lawyers had said in a motion filed on Wednesday that they have been swamped by up to nine million pages of documents, 270 hours of tapes and summaries of interviews with more than 700 people and had not had time to cope with the massive amount of preparation.

Federal prosecutors have 500 hours of FBI wiretap tapes in which they say Blagojevich is plainly heard saying he wants something in return for the Senate seat.

"I want to make money," the 53-year-old, bushy haired Democrat says in a telephone discussion of the seat with a lobbyist friend taped in November 2008, according to an FBI affidavit.

"I've got this thing and it's [expletive] golden, and I'm just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing," he is quoted as saying on a tape made just one month before FBI agents arrived at his door at dawn and told him that he was underarrest.

The former Governor says he never schemed to sell the Senate seat but instead planned to give it to state Attorney-General Lisa Madigan in a routine deal with her father, state House Speaker Michael Madigan, to push through tax cuts, a healthcare package and a jobs bill.

- AP