Pat Dollard | Young Americans

“I had no contact with the governor or his office and so I was not aware of what was happening …” - Prez-Elect Barry.

Blagojevich’s Big Conference Call and Valerie Jarrett’s Clean Break

by Cam Simpson (WSJ)

Among the hundreds of hours of conversations involving Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich secretly recorded by the FBI since Oct. 22, one phone call is drawing particular scrutiny among politicos, journalists and others in Washington. It was a marathon conference call on Monday, Nov. 10.

The call lasted about two hours. On the phone were Mr. Blagojevich, his wife, his general counsel, an unnamed adviser, and John Harris, the governor’s chief of staff and his co-defendant in this week’s case.

But what’s drawing the most interest is who was on the line from Washington, and the sequence of political events that followed that same night and in the ensuing days regarding Barack Obama’s close friend and adviser, Valerie Jarrett.

According to the FBI, there were “various Washington, D.C., based advisers” on the call with Mr. Blagojevich & Co., although the Washington callers are not named. The FBI also said participants popped on and off the line throughout the conversation.

During the call, Mr. Blagojevich and those closest to him allegedly detailed virtually every one of their ideas for turning Mr. Obama’s open Senate seat into something valuable. Specifically, the governor asked “what he can get from the President-elect for the Senate seat,” the FBI alleged, adding later that callers talked about how to “monetize” Mr. Blagojevich’s connections.

Mr. Blagojevich also bemoaned what he called his financial struggles, although his post reportedly pays about $177,000 per year. “The immediate challenge,” the governor allegedly said, “[is] how do we take some of the financial pressure off of our family.”

Callers discussed the possibility of ambassadorships, which are made by the president. They talked about an appointment for Mr. Blagojevich as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, also made by the president. They explored the idea of getting Mr. Obama to use his clout to put the governor’s wife on corporate boards. And they discussed a deal involving the Service Employee International Union, which would be asked to install Mr. Blagojevich over one of its top political groups in exchange for the union getting to tell Mr. Obama that it was delivering the open U.S. Senate seat to his favorite candidate.

That candidate, Mr. Blagojevich believed, was Valerie Jarrett, according to sources familiar with this part of the probe.

There is no inference that Mr. Obama knew about or encouraged any of this alleged scheming, and he has explicitly denied it. But the big question today is this: Were any members of his transition team among the “Washington advisers” on the line during this marathon conference call, or did one of the participants fill them in about these wild ideas?

Mr. Obama’s people are not commenting on details about the case. But the reason that question is on so many minds today is because of what happened that very same Monday night.

At 7:56 p.m. Eastern Time, CNN reported that “two Democratic sources close to President-elect Barack Obama tell CNN that top adviser Valerie Jarrett will not be appointed to replace him in the U.S. Senate.”

That was an abrupt turnaround. While we can’t vouch for CNN’s reportage, the network had reported that same weekend that Ms. Jarrett was Mr. Obama’s top choice. (Ms. Jarrett herself confirmed that she was out of contention two days after it was reported by CNN, and two days after the marathon conference call. She told the PBS show The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, “Well, you know what? I`m actually not interested in the Senate position.”)

At a bare minimum, the timing of Team Obama’s decision to remove Ms. Jarrett’s name from contention, or at least to remove her name from the public speculation about the post, seems extraordinarily lucky. It came on the very same day the FBI secretly recorded Mr. Blagojevich telling a huge conference call loaded with politicos, in Illinois and Washington, that he wasn’t about to give the Senate spot away for nothing.

It’s also the same recorded conversation in which Mr. Blagojevich uses an obscenity to refer to Mr. Obama, before the governor makes clear he won’t give the president-elect the seat for free. “F— him. For nothing? F— him.”

Look for everyone to continue focusing on this call, and who from Washington was on the line.

Scandal Is an Early Test for Obama Team

By PETER BAKER and JEFF ZELENY - (NYTimes)

WASHINGTON — When Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, began exploring whether she might fill Barack Obama’s seat in the United States Senate, she called Rahm Emanuel. They served in the House together and, more important, he had just become chief of staff to the newly elected president.

But Mr. Emanuel was uncharacteristically circumspect. If Mr. Obama had a favorite, Mr. Emanuel was not saying. And to Ms. Schakowsky, he seemed wary about Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, who would be making the appointment. “Rahm always has good intelligence,” she recalled. “In this case, he really didn’t. It was not clear to him what the governor was going to do, or at least he didn’t share it with me.”

For the Obama team in the days after his election to the presidency, the question of who would succeed him in the Senate was a sensitive one. With a new administration to build and a financial crisis worsening by the day, Mr. Obama and his advisers had bigger issues on their plate. Moreover, they wanted to keep their distance from Mr. Blagojevich, who was already known to be under federal investigation into possible corruption. But many still assumed that Mr. Obama’s voice would be critical if he chose to weigh in.

Exactly what role he or his team played will be a focus of intense scrutiny in the weeks to come after the arrest of Mr. Blagojevich on accusations that he was plotting to trade or sell the Senate appointment. In that sense, the furor could be the first test of the Obama team’s ability to manage a growing scandal in an era when intense media scrutiny and partisan attack machinery can escalate any flap into a serious political problem.

Mr. Obama said Tuesday that he had never spoken with the governor about the seat, and prosecutors have not implicated Mr. Obama or his advisers. At the same time, Mr. Obama’s team has declined for two days to answer questions about what discussions they had about the seat and whether intermediaries had any contacts with Mr. Blagojevich’s advisers.

Republicans have raised questions about Mr. Obama’s refusal to say more and about his past ties with the main characters. Even if Mr. Obama remains untouched by the investigation, it shines a light on the corrupt politics of the state he emerged from and takes attention away from the agenda of change he would rather emphasize.

“This is a huge distraction at the worst possible moment,” said Lanny J. Davis, a former White House special counsel who did damage control for President Bill Clinton.

And it can grow if not handled properly. “It’s like the whirlwind,” said Chris Lehane, another veteran of the Clinton teams. “You get pulled into the vortex more and more.”

Mr. Obama stayed out of sight on Wednesday, calling for Mr. Blagojevich’s resignation through an aide and only after other Democrats had done so. Aides were told by transition lawyers not to comment. But Mr. Obama plans to hold a news conference on Thursday on health care during which he presumably will be asked about the inquiry.

By the account of several Democrats close to him, Mr. Obama did not try to insert himself into the selection of his successor, at least partly because of his own strained relationship with Mr. Blagojevich and partly because he had long since grown restless with the Senate. He discussed it with allies, like fellow Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, but not with some others involved.

Ms. Schakowsky, one of many interested in the Senate seat and probably not a front-runner, said she had never talked with Mr. Obama about the seat. Likewise, the president-elect never brought it up with another potential candidate, Tammy Duckworth, the director of veterans’ affairs in Illinois, when the two participated in a Veterans Day ceremony, an aide to Ms. Duckworth said.

Neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Durbin was invited by Mr. Blagojevich to offer advice, the Democrats said. “We all have varying levels of cooperation with the governor. Mine was extremely limited,” Mr. Durbin said in an interview. “I believe President-elect Obama could say the same.” He added, “I knew there was a process in place in the governor’s office, but I had no idea what it involved.”

Mr. Emanuel was among the few people in Mr. Obama’s circle who occasionally spoke to Mr. Blagojevich. He declined to answer questions on Wednesday, waving off a reporter who approached him as he walked across Capitol Hill.

A Democrat familiar with Illinois politics and the Obama transition, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said there probably were calls between the Blagojevich and Obama camps about the Senate seat. It was not clear if any calls were recorded by federal agents, who had tapped the governor’s phones.

Mr. Blagojevich was largely keeping his own counsel on the selection process, several Democrats said. One aide close to Mr. Obama and Mr. Durbin said it seemed Mr. Blagojevich was “on an iceberg,” far removed from most party leaders. The governor did not return telephone calls from Mr. Durbin for nearly two weeks, Democrats said. Ms. Schakowsky said he took days to answer her messages, too. When he did call back, he spoke with her for less than 10 minutes as she made her case for the seat.

“I see in retrospect,” Ms. Schakowsky said, “I probably wasn’t in contention — he didn’t ask me for anything.”

(top picture Kurt-Shop)