Karl Rove Declined to Comment

In the most recent issue of Fortune Magazine, there is an insightful and interesting article on former Republican U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois who only served one-term and vacated his seat in 2004 which Barack Obama won.

The topic of the article is banking, but Fitzgerald talks about the Rove Republican Racket and how they tried to cover for then-Illinois Governor George Ryan.

Fitzgerald accuses Karl Rove of trying to pressure him to nominate someone from the corrupt Chicago machine as U.S. Attorney, which for our sake Fitzgerald refused. Read this:

Presidents customarily defer to senators in their party with regard to nominations of U.S. attorneys. And as the lone Republican senator from Illinois, that responsibility fell to Fitzgerald in 2001. Worried about corruption in state politics, Fitzgerald took the highly unusual step of seeking a U.S. attorney from outside Illinois. "I wanted somebody who was not under the thumb of the powers that be in Chicago," says Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald asked FBI director Louis Freeh for a recommendation, and it was Freeh who suggested Patrick Fitzgerald, a no-nonsense terrorism prosecutor in Manhattan's U.S. Attorney's Office. When word got out, Fitzgerald says, Bush's White House chief of staff Karl Rove told him he had to select someone from Chicago - a directive Fitzgerald obviously ignored. But the press reacted so favorably, Fitzgerald says, "the White House was just inclined to go along."

Fitzgerald also alleges that the Speaker of the House at that time, Dennis Hastert - a Republican from Illinois - at first asked the White House to let him make the nomination instead of Fitzgerald. Hastert was close to Gov. Ryan - who is today serving a 6½-year sentence for corruption - and Fitzgerald believes that Hastert wanted to install a U.S. attorney who "would put a kibosh on the Ryan investigation." Hastert denies Fitzgerald's claims. Rove declined to comment.