WASHINGTON (AP) - President-elect Barack Obama has said all along that neither he nor his team was involved in any eye-popping dealmaking over filling his vacated Senate seat. Obama's hand-picked investigator agreed. "Everybody behaved appropriately," declared Greg Craig, Obama's incoming White House counsel and the person asked to conduct the internal inquiry into contacts between the transition team and Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Translation....cover story being told uniformly.
Prosecutors have said Obama is not implicated in the case against Blagojevich, accused of trying to sell Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder. But the corruption scandal has drained precious energy from Obama's preparations to take over the White House.
In addition to the time Craig devoted to the internal review that Obama requested, the topic also has surfaced at news conferences intended to highlight key appointments and policy priorities. And Obama himself had to sit down last week in Chicago for an interview by federal investigators, Craig's report revealed. Accompanying him was lawyer Robert Bauer, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
Federal investigators last week also interviewed two top Obama aides, incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. Though Craig completed his review more than a week ago, Obama delayed making it public until those interviews were finished and U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald gave his team the go-ahead to put it out.
Then he and Rahm split for an extended, media controlled vacation.
| Rahm went to deepest, darkest Africa. Not sure what he's doing there but he's not coming back anytime soon ... |
Signal to press.... don't bring it up again if you wish to see me on a regular basis.
Blagojevich is accused of trying to use his authority as governor to appoint Obama's Senate replacement to get cash or a lucrative job for himself, starting days before Obama's Nov. 4 election through Dec. 5. The governor has denied any criminal wrongdoing and has resisted multiple calls for his resignation, including from Obama.
And he will hopefully fight to the very end of Obama.
Wiretapped conversations cited in the criminal complaint against Blagojevich were not available to the Obama lawyers who conducted the internal review.
Which means Obama lawyers probably requested them.
| And they don't get them because their client hasn't been indicted. It's a great game: Fitzgerald & Co. know what's on the tapes but no one else does. They know who talked to whom and when. They can check telephone records and find out who each party on the tapes talked to before and after each taped call. They can then go to those third parties and ask questions about what they said to the targets. They can then go back to the targets and ask each of them what was said in those conversations. And anything that doesn't sound or smell right gets more attention. This is how Fitzgerald & Co. trapped Scooter Libby. Libby might not have done anything wrong in outing Plame (a reasonable debate could be had), but he didn't help himself by giving conflicting and inconsistent answers to the investigators. And federal investigators hate being lied to. Brick by brick, drip by drip, Fitzgerald & Co. build a case based on the taped conversations, the phone logs, and by repeated interviews with the targets and the third parties. And it's doubly bad for Rahm and any other staffer involved, because they don't dare invoke their Fifth amendment rights against self-incrimination: even the New York Times would have to report that, and you can imagine the damage to the Bambi administration. I am not going to pray that the country fail just to get Bambi. I am not going to be like the Kos Kiddies these past eight years despoiling George Bush at every opportunity. I want the country to recover, the recession to end, our troops to come home with the honor they deserve, and the good people of the world to be safe from terrorists. And if I can have all that and a salacious scandal for the Bambi administration, well then, heh ... |