Report: Rezko's Obama claims a ploy

CHICAGO, June 16 (UPI) -- Sources say a letter written by convicted Illinois political figure Tony Rezko claiming he was pressured to implicate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama may be misleading.

The April letter, written by Rezko to the judge at his fraud trial in U.S. District Court in Chicago, intimates that prosecutors were pressuring him to implicate Obama, D-Ill., the likely Democratic presidential nominee, and Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich in exchange for leniency.

Rezko, a longtime state Democratic Party fundraising figure, was convicted June 4 of accepting kickbacks from clients in exchange for promises of political favors.

But, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Monday, unnamed sources claim the letter could have merely been a ploy. They told the newspaper Rezko believed he had been jailed just before his trial as a tactic to get him to "flip" and that the letter was sent as a message to prosecutors that Rezko wasn't interested in making a deal, making claims about pressure to "name names" that may not have been true.

Rezko's attorney, Joseph Duffy, told the Sun-Times that Rezko never sat down for an interview with prosecutors and was never pressured either directly or indirectly to talk about Obama, Blagojevich or anyone else.