[caption id="attachment_10179" align="alignleft" width="112" caption="no caption required"][/caption] The Chicago Tribune rounds up what's left of its newsroom (ten reporters are cited as writers or contributors) to cover a jury convicting former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on one count of lying to the FBI. So Blagojevich was found not guilty of 23 other counts charged by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. These include the headline extortion, racketeering and conspiracy charges, which asserted that Blagojevich wanted to auction off the vacant Illinois U.S. Senate seat and that the former governor ran the state as if it were a crime syndicate.

Here is encouraging news on the Chicago crime-fighting front. The Chicago Tribune's Annie Sweeney reports on the early success of a program in which the Chicago Police Department calls on the expertise of the Cook County Sheriff's Department and FBI to track down felons and illegal guns. Officers arrested "dozens" of felons over the weekend and confiscated a .50 caliber pistol, while operating in three different Chicago neighborhoods. Perhaps more remarkable -- though correlation may not equal causation here -- was that there were no shootings or homicides in those neighborhoods over the weekend.

Recovery, or at least stabilization, may be the watch words on Wall Street and in private industry, but for municipalities in California, it's still very much the darkest hour.  As Ryan Gabrielson of CaliforniaWatch reports that seven different L.A. County municipalities have approached the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department about having the sheriffs take over local policing duties. That's about double what's considered normal in a tough economic period.

A critical part of the Chicago gun control debate is why so many weapons were already in the city before handguns became legal to carry this month. The Chicago Tribune's Becky Schlikerman reports one successful instance of the city teaming up with the FBI to seize 60 unregistered and illegal guns from 25 city residents. The FBI and Chicago Police Department arrested suspects who were going to use guns for an armed robbery to get cocaine -- but the FBI says the sting was about guns, not drugs. The Supreme Court effectively ended Chicago's 28 year-old gun ban last month.

The Chicago Sun-Times’ Natasha Korecki has a level-headed piece on the Justice Dept.'s case against Rod Blagojevich. The federal corruption trial has featured a bunch of embarrassing things that Blagojevich said and actions that he may have planned to take. But few, if any, crimes were carried out. For example, Blagojevich floated the idea of offering Jesse Jackson, Jr. a U.S. Senate seat for a $1.5 million campaign contribution. Such a quid pro quo would have been illegal. But the FBI arrested Blagojevich before it could actually happen. It’s hard to defend Blagojevich (legally or otherwise). But, with the prosecution expected to wrap its case up this week, the U.S. Attorney's office may not have proven guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

It's the one positive national trend in the recession -- all crime, especially violent crime, is down across the country. And crime has sharply decreased in the biggest cities.

Why exactly does the Washington Post think the Department of Justice "owes" them or the public more information about the apprehension of alleged terrorist Faisal Shahzad?  My guess is the Post's editors felt they'd been left high and dry when the NYPD, the FBI and other investigators made an arrest in just 53 hours.  Not to mention the poor cable news producers -- think of the hours and hours of repetitious, recyclable content lost.  Turns out government disappoints when it works too slowly and when it works too fast. 

The Wall Street Journal's Evan Perez and Siobhan Gorman report: The head of a new elite terrorism-interrogation program said Thursday that it will take several more months to establish teams that could question high-profile suspects. The teams are part of an overhaul of counterterrorism policy and have become an issue in ...

The Washington Post's Carrie Johnson relays a Justice Dept. inspector general report that finds between 2002 and 2006 the FBI violated privacy laws 700 times in obtaining phone records. In the process, more than 3,500 phone numbers were gathered improperly, often gathered under the pretext of phony terror threats. This sounds like a big deal -- or at least larger than either FBI or Congress are making it out to be. FBI Director Robert Mueller seems proud of the fact that the FBI has gone almost four years not illegally obtaining phone records, though Mueller promised the agency would look into disciplinary action for some employees. Vermont Democrat Pat Leahy, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a champion of preserving civil liberties during the "war on terror," said the report shows that Congress must eliminate the FBI's power to send letters to phone companies  requesting information on calls.

The Washington Post's John Solomon and Carrie Johnson break the news that the FBI collected more than 2,000 phone records between 2002 and 2006 without having a proper subpoena for the records. A Justice Dept. Inspector General report is supposed to come out later this month that concluded the ...