More On The Obama “I never talked to Blagojevich about the Senate seat” And The Timeline…Axelrod endorsed Blago-style politics in 2005

Posted by Pam on 12/10/2008

As I mentioned in this post, Obama said he never talked to Blagojevich about the Senate seat; Axelrod said “Yes, he did” Axelrod misspoke, was the reaction from the Obama camp…The Obama camp moved quickly to try and cover for Obama. Let’s take a look at a few things here:

Jim Lindgren: Blago timeline: What did Team Obama know and when did they know it?

1. On the weekend of Nov. 8-9, Obama lets it be known that his choice for Senate is Valerie Jarrett. Aides tell WLS-TV in Chicago and CNN, which announces Obama’s choice on Sunday. Nov. 9.

2. On Monday, Nov. 10, Blagojevich holds an incredible 2-hour conference call with multiple consultants: “ROD BLAGOJEVICH, his wife, JOHN HARRIS, Governor General Counsel, and various Washington-D.C. based advisors, including Advisor B,” discussing his corrupt schemes. He follows this with two calls with Advisor A.

3. That very night, Monday, Nov. 10, at 7:56pm, CNN reported:

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.

“While he (Obama) thinks she would be a good senator, he wants her in the White House,” one top Obama advisor told CNN Monday.

Over the weekend, Democratic sources had told CNN as well as Chicago television station WLS-TV that Jarrett was Obama’s choice to fill his Senate seat.

So what happened? The likeliest scenario is that one of the many participants in Blagojevich’s Monday phone calls either floated his plans to the Obama transition team to assess their response or tipped off the Obama camp about the reckless ideas that Blagojevich had planned.

In any event, within hours of Blagojevich substantially expanding his circle of confidants, the Obama camp withdrew Jarrett’s name from consideration and attributed that withdrawal to the President’s wanting Jarrett in the White House. And the Obama staffers went out of their way to depict this as Obama’s choice, rather than Jarrett’s, which would have been more common. The report claims Obama’s involvement in the decision and suggests a direct effort to undercut the idea that Obama was pressuring Blagojevich to appoint Jarrett.

4. Moreover, by the next day, Tuesday, Nov. 11, Blagojevich already had received his answer from the Obama camp that no quid pro quo would be forthcoming: “ROD BLAGOJEVICH said he knows that the President-elect wants Senate Candidate 1 for the Senate seat but ‘they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. F**k them.’”

5. On Wednesday, Nov. 12, Blagojevich pitched his corrupt bargain idea to an SEIU Official who, according to Ben Smith, is President Andy Stern. Stern agreed to convey the offer to the relevant actors. Blagojevich understood Stern to be contacting Jarrett herself, the co-chairwoman of the Obama transition team:

109. On November 12, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH spoke with SEIU Official, who was in Washington, D.C. Prior intercepted phone conversations indicate that approximately a week before this call, ROD BLAGOJEVICH met with SEIU Official to discuss the vacant Senate seat, and ROD BLAGOJEVICH understood that SEIU Official was an emissary to discuss Senate Candidate 1’s interest in the Senate seat.

During the conversation with SEIU Official on November 12, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH informed SEIU Official that he had heard the President-elect wanted persons other than Senate Candidate 1 to be considered for the Senate seat.

SEIU Official stated that he would find out if Senate Candidate 1 wanted SEIU Official to keep pushing her for Senator with ROD BLAGOJEVICH. ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that “one thing I’d be interested in” is a 501(c)(4) organization.

ROD BLAGOJEVICH explained the 501(c)(4) idea to SEIU Official and said that the 501(c)(4) could help “our new Senator [Senate Candidate 1].” SEIU Official agreed to “put that flag up and see where it goes.”

110. On November 12, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH talked with Advisor B. ROD BLAGOJEVICH told Advisor B that he told SEIU Official, “I said go back to [Senate Candidate 1], and, and say hey, look, if you still want to be a Senator don’t rule this out and then broach the idea of this 501(c)(4) with her.”

6. The complaint doesn’t say whether Stern contacted Jarrett or other members of the Obama transition team, but it is likely that he did. Whether Stern was horrified by Blagojevich’s corrupt idea and wanted to warn Obama or intrigued by the deal and wanted to assess its chances, I can’t think of a good reason why Stern wouldn’t have conveyed the idea to the Obama camp.

7. On Thursday, Nov. 13:

ROD BLAGOJEVICH asked Advisor A to call Individual A and have Individual A pitch the idea of the 501(c)(4) to “[President-elect Advisor].” Advisor A said that, “while it’s not said this is a play to put in play other things.” ROD BLAGOJEVICH responded, “correct.” Advisor A asked if this is “because we think there’s still some life in [Senate Candidate 1] potentially?” ROD BLAGOJEVICH said, “not so much her, but possibly her. But others.”

8. If, as seems likely, Individual A then pitched Blagojevich’s corrupt bargain to the “President-elect Advisor” and that advisor is Rahm Emanuel, as has been suggested by others, then Emanuel would then have known of the bribery attempt.

9. By 6:10pm on Friday, Nov. 14, CNN is reporting:

Valerie Jarrett tells CNN contributor Roland Martin that President-elect Barack Obama offered and she accepted a position in the Obama administration – she will be the Senior Adviser to the President and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Liaison.

10. Nov. 14 to early December: After occasionally feeding speculation about who might fill Obama’s seat, the Obama transition team suddenly goes remarkably silent about his preference.

11. On Nov. 23, Obama’s “senior adviser David Axelrod appeared on Fox News Chicago,” answering a question about the Senate seat.

While insisting that the President-elect had not expressed a favorite to replace him, and his inclination was to avoid being a “kingmaker,” Axelrod said, “I know he’s talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names many of which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them.”

Note the language used. While on Nov. 9, Obama staffers were telling multiple news outlets whom Obama wanted for his Senate seat, by Nov. 23, Axelrod was distancing Obama not only from any individual choice, but he used the pejorative term “kingmaker” to emphasize Obama’s avoidance of any even marginally corrupt influence. It is likely that Axelrod had in mind the corrupt bargain that Obama’s camp had already turned down.

12. On Tuesday, Dec. 8, Obama denies personal knowledge of the corrupt proposal.

“I had no contact with the governor or his office and so we were not, I was not aware of what was happening.”

As I’ve said before, as with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama’s words should be read carefully to see what he is saying and not saying. Apparently, Obama started to say that “we were not” “aware of what was happening,” but corrected himself by saying that “I was not aware of what was happening.”

That language leaves open the possibility that his staff was aware, but he personally was not. But why would Obama’s staff withhold information from him? I assume that Obama is telling the truth about not having spoken to the governor himself, since that might be easily refuted.

CONCLUSION:

From the evening of Nov. 10 until yesterday, Blagojevich, Obama, and his transition team acted in ways that are consistent with a knowledge of Blagojevich’s bribery attempt and a rejection of that attempt. What doesn’t fit easily with the timeline is Obama’s statement yesterday.

Axelrod endorsed Blago-style politics in 2005

Patrick Fitzgerald’s charges against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich have drawn a chorus of shock and outrage.

But Barack Obama’s message man David Axelrod once staked out a much more nuanced position on Fitzgerald’s anti-corruption crusade.

In a 2005 op-ed, Axelrod argued, in effect, that trading political favors – including jobs – is part of the grease that makes government work.

He ripped Fitzgerald at the time for trying “to use the criminal code to enforce (his) vision” of “entirely remov(ing) politics from government.”

The piece in the Chicago Tribune was prompted by Fitzgerald’s indictment of aides to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley for conspiring to give city jobs as political favors. Daley was Axelrod’s client at the time.

Three years ago, Axelrod defended the concept of horse trading:

Daley ally and adviser David Axelrod said that some of the alleged conduct, such as faking interview results, would be clearly wrong. But he said Fitzgerald’s effort to criminalize patronage could eliminate job recommendations altogether.

“His grand vision is of a day when you just go, put in your application, take a test and get hired, and recommendations have no place,” Axelrod said. “It’s a very sobering and profound thing. I don’t think it’s legally just, and I don’t think it’s wise.”

How does that differ from this, except for the colorful expletives?

Throughout the intercepted conversations, Blagojevich also allegedly spent significant time weighing the option of appointing himself to the open Senate seat and expressed a variety of reasons for doing so, including: frustration at being “stuck” as governor; a belief that he will be able to obtain greater resources if he is indicted as a sitting Senator as opposed to a sitting governor; a desire to remake his image in consideration of a possible run for President in 2016; avoiding impeachment by the Illinois legislature; making corporate contacts that would be of value to him after leaving public office; facilitating his wife’s employment as a lobbyist; and generating speaking fees should he decide to leave public office…

In a conversation with Harris on November 11, the charges state, Blagojevich said he knew that the President-elect wanted Senate Candidate 1 for the open seat but “they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. [Expletive] them.”…

As recently as December 4, in separate conversations with Advisor B and Fundraiser A, Blagojevich said that he was “elevating” Senate Candidate 5 on the list of candidates because, among other reasons, if Blagojevich ran for re-election, Senate Candidate 5 would “raise[] money” for him. Blagojevich said that he might be able to cut a deal with Senate Candidate 5 that provided Blagojevich with something “tangible up front.”

For Obama and his team, the Blagojevich scandal is a stink bomb tossed at close range

Legal bills, off-message headlines, and a sustained attempt by Republicans to show that Obama is more a product of Illinois’s malfeasance-prone political culture than he is letting on—all are likely if the Blagojevich case goes to trial or becomes an extended affair.

Obama and his aides have so far mounted a tight-lipped defense, publicly distancing themselves from Blagojevich’s alleged plans to profit personally from his power to fill Obama’s newly vacant Senate seat with firm but vague denials of any involvement.

The Blagojevich Case: Why Did Fitzgerald Act Now?

But of all those questions, perhaps the most intriguing is why prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, whose office had been gathering astonishing evidence implicating Blagojevich and others, went public Tuesday with the criminal complaint and arrest of Blagojevich. Why not let the investigation go on, at least for a bit longer? At his news conference, Fitzgerald attributed his action to Blagojevich’s allegedly corrupt dealings involving a Chicago hospital, and corrupt dealings toward the Tribune company, and then added, “You take that, and what’s going on, and add it to the fact that we have a Senate seat that seemed to be as recently as days ago auctioned off to the highest bidder for campaign contributions and Gov. Blagojevich’s own words on the tape, on the bug, that set forth in the complaint talked about selling this like a sports agent. So we stepped in for a number of reasons.”

Later in his news conference, however, Fitzgerald suggested that the alleged Senate deal had come to drive the investigation — “When there’s a bunch of people scheming in private, and they think no one’s listening and no one’s aware of it, they can do a heck of a lot more than when someone goes and basically raids the crime in plot and airs what’s going on,” he said. And a reading of the criminal complaint suggests that events in the alleged Senate selloff might have been what tipped prosecutors toward action. As the investigation moved toward what appeared to be a climax, with perhaps a deal to be made for a Senate seat, a media report scared Blagojevich, who up to that point had displayed astonishingly brazen behavior. Blagojevich stopped the Senate-selling negotiations and began planning a legal defense — and Fitzgerald, his target now on the alert, went public a short time later.

The complaint describes in detail several conversations Blagojevich had concerning the Senate seat, starting on November 3, the day before Barack Obama was elected president, and going on for ten days, until November 13. In conversations secretly recorded by Fitzgerald’s office during that period, Blagojevich clumsily discussed all sorts of options through which he might profit from the Senate appointment — a Cabinet job for himself, a major position with a Democratic-dominated union, a new charity/activist organization that would pay Blagojevich a healthy sum.

After several pages of detailing those machinations, the criminal complaint takes an abrupt turn, describing no wiretaps for a period of three weeks. The complaint says Blagojevich had “numerous conversations” about the Senate seat during that period, but it doesn’t detail any. Then, it skips forward to a conversation that took place on December 4. That suggests the conversations that took place in the three weeks after November 13 broke no new ground, as far as Blagojevich’s corrupt plans were concerned.

And then, on December 4, something changed, and that change was the presence of the person referred to in the complaint as “Candidate Five.” If the complaint is correct, in “Candidate Five,” Blagojevich finally found a prospective senator who might come up with money — $500,000 for Blagojevich’s political organization — in return for the Obama seat. From the criminal complaint:

On December 4, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH spoke to Advisor B and informed Advisor B that he was giving Senate Candidate 5 greater consideration for the Senate seat because, among other reasons, if ROD BLAGOJEVICH ran for re-election Senate Candidate 5 would “raise[] money” for ROD BLAGOJEVICH, although ROD BLAGOJEVICH said he might “get some (money) up front, maybe” from Senate Candidate 5 to insure Senate Candidate 5 kept his promise about raising money for ROD BLAGOJEVICH. (In a recorded conversation on October 31, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH described an earlier approach by an associate of Senate Candidate Five as follows: “We were approached ‘pay to play.’ That, you know, he’d raise me 500 grand. An emissary came. Then the other guy would raise a million, if I made him (Senate Candidate 5) a Senator.”)

The complaint goes on to say that on that same day, December 4, Blagojevich told a person referred to as Fundraiser A that he was “elevating” Candidate Five on the Senate list in the hopes that Candidate Five would provide something “tangible up front.” Blagojevich told Fundraiser A to “reach out” to an associate of Candidate Five and say that Blagojevich was under pressure to appoint somebody else and wanted to know if Candidate Five would really come up with the money, especially because, in the words of the complaint, Blagojevich “had a prior bad experience with Candidate Five not keeping his word.” (That, of course, suggests that Candidate Five is probably a well-known political figure in Illinois; no definitive word yet on who that is.) Blagojevich told Fundraiser A to meet personally with the associate of Candidate Five and, in the words of the complaint, “communicate the ‘urgency’ of the situation.”

The dealing seemed very close to a climax — and an explosive political scandal. And then, on the morning of December 5, the Chicago Tribune ran a story on its front page reporting that law enforcement had secretly recorded Blagojevich’s conversations as part of a criminal investigation. Blagojevich immediately instructed Fundraiser A to “undo” the plan to meet personally with the associate of Candidate Five. Blagojevich instead turned his energy to preparing his legal defense.

The deal was off, blown, apparently, by the Tribune’s report. For anyone who has watched the case, the astonishing thing is that Blagojevich, prior to December 5, could possibly have assumed that he wasn’t under surveillance. But he apparently did, making for some of the juiciest political wiretaps in years. And he appeared to be moving toward actually making a corrupt deal to sell Obama’s Senate seat when he finally, belatedly, figured things out. And that seems to be the best explanation for why prosecutor Fitzgerald went public on December 9, instead of letting the case continue for a while longer.

The state legislature will move quickly to strip him of power:

The state’s top two legislative leaders Tuesday said they will move fast to seize control of the process of selecting a replacement for Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate, taking that power away from Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

In separate statements, House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President Emil Jones said they will call a special legislative session next week to repeal the state law that now gives the governor the power to fill Mr. Obama’s seat. Both said they will press instead for a special election to fill the remaining two years of Mr. Obama’s term.

“I am prepared to convene the House next Monday to change state law to provide for a special election for the U.S. Senate replacement,” Mr. Madigan said. “I would urge U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin to take note of this action.”

Just when you thought the New York Times couldn’t be any more shameless or absurd: Obama’s Effort on Ethics Bill Had Role in Governor’s Fall…

Yes boys and girls, Obama called Emil Jones, the corrupt politician that handed 26 pieces of legislation to Obama, and made him a senator, and he put an end to the corruption! =)) A reminder of Emil Jones

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

“I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,” State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. “Barack didn’t have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.

“I don’t consider it bill jacking,” Hendon told me. “But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book.”

During his seventh and final year in the state Senate, Obama’s stats soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law ” including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced.

It was a stunning achievement that started him on the path of national politics ” and he couldn’t have done it without Jones.

Before Obama ran for U.S. Senate in 2004, he was virtually unknown even in his own state. Polls showed fewer than 20 percent of Illinois voters had ever heard of Barack Obama.

Jones further helped raise Obama’s profile by having him craft legislation addressing the day-to-day tragedies that dominated local news Âheadlines.

For instance. Obama sponsored a bill banning the use of the diet supplement ephedra, which killed a Northwestern University football player, and another one preventing the use of pepper spray or pyrotechnics in nightclubs in the wake of the deaths of 21 people during a stampede at a Chicago nightclub. Both stories had received national attention and extensive local coverage.

I spoke to Jones earlier this week and he confirmed his conversation with Kelley, adding that he gave Obama the legislation because he believed in Obama’s ability to negotiate with Democrats and Republicans on divisive issues.

So how has Obama repaid Jones?

Last June, to prove his commitment to government transparency, Obama released a comprehensive list of his earmark requests for fiscal year 2008. It comprised more than $300 million in pet projects for Illinois, including tens of millions for Jones’s Senate district.

Shortly after Jones became Senate president, I remember asking his view on pork-barrel spending.

I’ll never forget what he said:

“Some call it pork; I call it steak.”