Saturday, December 27, 2008

CHICAGO, USA (AP) - The committee of the House of Representatives from Illinois who is studying a possible impeachment to the governor Rod Blagojevich did not call to testify two members of the team's president-elect Barack Obama, said on Saturday the president's panel , Thereby rejecting a request from the governor's lawyer.

In a letter received by the committee on Friday, the federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald asked the panel investigating not called to testify to the Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, the chief of staff appointed Rahm Emanuel, the Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. Nor Nils Larsen, executive vice president of media conglomerate Tribune Co..

Fitzgerald said that such appointments "interfere with the ongoing criminal investigation on the activities of Governor Rod Blagojevich and others."

The governor's lawyer, Ed Genson, had previously asked the panel to issue subpoenas.

"It is the turn of Mr Genson," he said on Saturday the legislative committee's chairwoman, Democrat Barbara Flynn Currie, to The Associated Press. "We are not interested in weakening the federal prosecutor's investigation."

Genson did not immediately responded to a call Saturday for comment on the matter.

Blagojevich was arrested on Dec. 9 on charges of conspiring to sell the Senate seat vacated by Obama, extort money from an executive of a hospital for donase campaign funds and other crimes.

Genson has said that the testimony of Emanuel, Jarrett and Jackson would help prove the governor's assertion that he did nothing improper to fill the seat of Obama.

Fitzgerald, however, said any testimony from Jarrett, Emanuel, Jackson or Larsen "in line with the theme of this criminal investigation."

It has been reported that Larsen was the financial advisor of the Tribune, which the governor's aides were instructed to talk about the dismissal of editorial writers in exchange for a grant to help sell the stadium Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, a team baseball ownership of the journalistic enterprise.

Flynn Currie had said on Thursday that the panel received a letter from Genson asking its members to testify that citasen Emanuel, Jarrett and more than a dozen other people.

On December 22, Fitzgerald had asked the committee did not delve into the criminal case against Blagojevich, saying that interviewing current or past members of the governor's staff would jeopardize their investigation.

The panel of the lower house will meet again on Monday.

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