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With Gov. Blagojevich, it’s not the amount of money he’s raising, but how much his campaign committee is spending on legal fees…

Winston & Strawn LLP… $163,770.57… 1/23/2007… Expenditure… Friends of Blagojevich… Legal Fees

There’s nothing big after that late January payment. He does have a habit of backdating his payments, though, so there’s no way to be sure if this is all he was billed.

Total spent on legal fees by Friends of Blagojevich since the committee was created in 2000: $1,217,393.26.

To put this into a bit of perspective, the next highest amount spent on legal fees during this latest six-month reporting period was $10,267.78 by Larry Dominick’s Cicero Voters Alliance, which is about 6 percent of what the governor’s campaign spent.

And a bit more perspective: The governor’s campaign has spent $919,745.31 since July 1, 2006 on legal bills. All campaign committees registered with the State Board of Elections in all of Illinois (the total of which is currently 3,585, but was probably higher last year) during that same time period spent $1,667,220.91 on legal fees.

The governor’s share, therefore, of all money spent on legal fees by all 3,500+ state and local Illinois campaign committees is 55.2 percent. Yet, the governor’s total campaign expenditures for everything during that same year was only 8.6 percent of the total spent by all campaign committees on everything - $17,185,530.95 spent by Friends of Blagojevich out of $199,896,778.68 spent by all committees. The governor’s legal fees represented 5.4 percent of all the money he expended from July 1 of ‘06 to June 30 of ‘07. The average for all campaign committee expenditures during that same period was 0.8 percent for legal fees.

From the Tribune…

Doug Scofield, a spokesman for Blagojevich’s campaign, declined to release details on the scope of the legal work by Winston & Strawn except to say, “We use them for all our campaign legal work.”

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