A panel of Illinois lawmakers considering the impeachment of Governor Rod Blagojevich ordered his campaign committee to turn over the names of every donor and the amount of money involved, Bloomberg reported.
The governor's campaign fund, Friends of Blagojevich, has until 10 a.m. local time tomorrow to comply with the subpoena, said state Representative Barbara Flynn Currie, the Democrat who leads the 21-member impeachment committee in the state capital of Springfield.
Blagojevich, 52, may be impeached as soon as the end of this week after U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald accused the Chicago Democrat of trying to auction President-elect Barack Obama's vacant U.S. Senate seat. The panel is also looking into what state Representative Lou Lang, the chief questioner for the committee's Democratic majority, has called abuses of power.
"We've been told some of the information might not be available because apparently the United States attorney took some of that material away from them and you're not allowed to make copies," Currie said today as the panel entered its fourth week of hearings.
The subpoena requires Blagojevich's campaign to disclose details about every contribution received from July 1 to Dec. 31, said Currie, the second-ranking Democrat in the Illinois House of Representatives after Speaker Michael Madigan.
Attorney Anthony Jacob of the Chicago-based law firm Hinshaw & Culbertson is legal counsel for the Friends of Blagojevich. He declined to comment on the impeachment panel request. Blagojevich, a former prosecutor twice elected governor of the fifth-most-populous state, has declined invitations to testify.
The panel, created Dec. 15 by Madigan, who leads the state's Democratic Party, today also discussed a confidential 2004 report by the Illinois Inspector General's Office that found Blagojevich violated hiring laws to give jobs to unqualified political friends and to cheat veterans of the armed forces out of state jobs.
The hiring report, which was released to the panel after Currie issued a subpoena, adds to administrative, policy and budget measures undertaken during Blagojevich's six years as governor that committee members said already provide grounds to impeach.