S.A.: So that tells you what kind of defense this is. The Judge made us give him hour by hour, line by line, and he would not approve them until he was satisfied that the hours spent were actually done and done at the public defender rates. Now, what lawyer in his right mind, since I obviously wasn't, what lawyer in his right mind who comes from one of these silk stocking firms, is going to charge public defender rates? At the time I think it was a hundred dollars an hour. Nobody. Nobody.
These silk stocking firms cost seven fifty. Especially out east. Seven fifty, seven eighty, an hour. Now if there is an investigation and he ends up being charged, he is going to have to, the Judge will probably allow him to use a lot of thecampaign fund but how much does he have in it?
R.K.: Ah ha. So even though people donated this for politics, wow. That's -
S.A.: Right. The theory behind that is look. This is part of the campaign. Our argument was, here look he is innocent until proven guilty and this does effect his political life. This money should be used to help him fight these charges that affect his political life. The judge agreed but under those circumstances.
R.K.: So you helped him get that situation?
S.A.: Yeah. Well the truth of the matter was, nobody at the moment he got arrested there was 0% approval rating. Nobody wanted to take him on that had any real experience. There were a lot of people that made offers to work, of course, but they didn't have any real experience. None of the silk stocking firms would take it because it was so, in their terms, little money.
My father and I had just come off of defending R. Kelly and we were here in Chicago and there was a lot of notoriety and it was just my father and me, we were small and still are, a small firm. And we said look, this guy he has got to get some help here, what is going on here is just not fair, we will work on this case, let's see if we can go in there and try to use some of the campaign funds here to defend this. Now what's on the other side of that, Rob, is, you have to look at what the government spends, you know?
This is, I am giving you true facts which is with Blagojevich we had a year and a half to prepare. It was my father and myself and then we ended up getting other people to help us because we were allowed to use those, we got turned over to us five million pages, I mean that's a tremendous amount of work. Tremendous amount of discovery. Five million! And we had some like two million emails that you have to go through, if you go through it just one time you're still trying to develop a defense.
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