Hey, let's check in with Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) shall we? The embattled legislator has a trial coming up on conspiracy and bribery charges stemming from a scheme that sounds like it was copied all or in part from the text of Nigerian email scams. And the courtroom drama begins...now!

In this week's pretrial hearings, Jefferson is trying to get the conspiracy and bribery charges dismissed saying he did things he's ashamed of but not the things they claim he did; the lynch pin of his argument seems to be that all the financial set-ups Jefferson allegedly engineering to facilitate the bribery are similar but not connected in a way that suggests conspiracy. He's just very, very interested in keeping his money separate.

Jefferson also wants to have his trial moved out of Virginia claiming he won't get a fair trial and that he should be tried in DC or in his home state as other legislators have been. He says investigators engineered a sting operation to lure Jefferson to Virginia to collect the famous briefcase full of cash so that the legislator would be charged in majority-white Virginia, and not majority-black Washington, DC. You know, I'm thinking the relevant bit here isn't so much where he accepted but THAT he accepted a briefcase filled with cash which he later chose to store in his freezer.