my suggestions to TPM’s name-that-scandal quest:

Just please, for the sake of all that may be Holy – Do NOT suggest “Roddergate”

Please???

- Spoil the Rod, Spare the Children(s’ Hospital)

- The Rod Deal

- The Pay to Prey Scandal

- The Price is Rod

- Big-Hair Todd, the Monster (obscure musical reference)

- DespeRoddo

- Desperately Seeking Something, Anything

Say JJJ sent an emissary to Team Blago just to open up the lines of communication and maybe feel out Team Blago on the Blagovernor’s being receptive or not to JJJ being appointed – and nothing further, like being authorized to enter into negotiations or a bidding war.

Then at the meeting of emissaries, say the Team Blago mouthpiece were to make the kind of suggestion I describe in #35 – i.e. if your guy or your guy’s people can offer arrange for Blago to get this job and for Lady Blago to be appointed to a cushy board job for X bucks or higher, then that could do the trick to get your boy what he wants.

Now if JJJ’s emissary were to start talking turkey, that emissary would have a problem, but to that point JJJ would not. If JJJ’s emissary said something like ‘I don’t have any authority here; I gotta get back to you’, and then proceeded to report back to JJJ – - and then allofasudden diaries are being checked for availability and places and times are being confirmed, well … that would tend to perk up the ears of anyone involved on the investigation side.

Lots of dons – also statesmen and politicians assuming those aren’t subcategories – like to insulate themselves by communicating through one or more ‘emissaries’ wherever possible, and when that’s the case, the trick for the prosecution side is to prove the particular emissary is speaking for the don. As to conspiracy [which, as you’ve noted is the under-particularized felony named in Count #1 of the Complaint], the terms of art involved are

[a] the one I alluded to in a response in an earlier thread, ‘acting to further one or more goals of the conspiracy”, a.k.a. ‘an act in furtherance’, and

[b] the principles of agency, often referred to as ‘acting through a co-conspirator’, which seems very often the case but nonetheless is unnecessary since its possible the agent might not be sufficiently aware of the existence of a conspiracy or of her or his role in the plot to be any more than an ‘innocent agent’.

A ready example here of a co-conspirator acting in furtherance would be if John Harris accepted directions from the Blagovernor to reach out to a supposed Contact Person of a particular Senate Candidate for the specific purpose of passing on an invitation to consider and return to Team Blago with an ‘offer’ to put the arm on the P-E’s transition team to parachute Blago into an apparently safe job under the control of the PE yet technically outside the incoming administration [SEIU would qualify] and arrange also for some cushy highly paid board appointment for Lady MacBlago.

For the purposes of proving the existence of a conspiracy to defraud the People of Illinois of the honest services of Blago and Harris, it wouldn’t be necessary to show that the approach to the Contact Person bore fruit, or even that it was all that realistic in terms of what the Contact Person’s principle, the Senate Candidate, might be able to achieve [although it would have to appear basically plausible to Team Blago]. It would be enough for Harris to proceed to act in a way that shows he accepted the directions, and so long as there was no other plausible explanation for his reaching out to the Contact Person to pass on Team Blago’s openness to such an arrangement – voila: conspiracy made out.

Let me tell you, there are lots of professional criminal defence lawyers, and even some professional prosecutors, who’ve had trouble grasping these concepts – but as usual you seem to have no problem picking up on them.