HONOLULU — In the days after Barack Obama’s election as president, Rahm Emanuel, a top adviser, suggested to Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois that Mr. Obama’s Senate seat should be filled by Valerie Jarrett, a confidante of Mr. Obama.
In that same week, as word of her potential interest in the Senate seat spread throughout the Chicago political world, Ms. Jarrett spoke with a labor union official in Illinois who said he had spoken to the governor about the possibility of appointing her to the seat. During that conversation, the union leader mentioned that Mr. Blagojevich had his eye on a possible cabinet position in the Obama administration.
The contact was among the findings of an internal report released Tuesday, compiled by lawyers for the president-elect. The report concluded that Mr. Emanuel had as many as six conversations with the governor’s office about the Senate vacancy, but that Mr. Obama had none, and that neither Mr. Emanuel, Ms. Jarrett, nor any other Obama associates had any talks about a deal in which Mr. Blagojevich would benefit from appointing someone to the Senate seat.
Mr. Blagojevich was charged by federal prosecutors in Chicago this month on a variety of corruption counts, including an alleged effort to trade the appointment to the Senate seat for a job or money. The report also disclosed that Mr. Obama, Mr. Emanuel and Ms. Jarrett were questioned by federal prosecutors last week in the corruption inquiry of the governor. Mr. Obama’s two-hour interview took place in his Chicago office, aides said, and he was not under oath or considered more than a witness in the case.
Mr. Obama did not speak about the matter on Tuesday. He continued his vacation in Hawaii, where he attended a memorial service for his grandmother, who died just before the election.
Ms. Jarrett, a longtime Chicago friend of the Obama family who will serve as a senior adviser in the White House, had no communication with Mr. Blagojevich or his aides, the report said. But it said that three days after the election, she spoke with Tom Balanoff, president of the Illinois chapter of the Service Employees International Union, about the Senate seat and the governor’s ambitions to serve in the Obama administration as secretary of health and human services.
This conversation, outlined for the first time, could be of interest in the criminal case against Mr. Blagojevich, who was recorded on the same day as the Jarrett-Balanoff meeting in wiretapped phone calls expressing an interest in a job with an arm of the union in exchange for a possible Senate appointment. According to an affidavit, Mr. Blagojevich was also captured on tape that day telling an unnamed adviser that he was willing to “trade” the appointment for the cabinet post.
“Ms. Jarrett did not understand the conversation to suggest that the governor wanted the cabinet seat as a quid pro quo for selecting any specific candidate to be the president-elect’s replacement,” Gregory B. Craig, who has been designated by Mr. Obama as his White House counsel, wrote in the report. “At no time did Balanoff say anything to her about offering Blagojevich a union position.”
The Obama transition team delayed the report’s release at the request of Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who wanted to interview prospective witnesses before it was made public. The delay prolonged questions on whether any Obama aides acted improperly in dealing with the governor’s office.
In the conversations with Mr. Blagojevich immediately after the election, Mr. Emanuel recommended Ms. Jarrett for the Senate seat, the report said, a position that later turned out to be contrary to Mr. Obama’s wishes.
“In those early conversations with the governor, Mr. Emanuel recommended Valerie Jarrett because he knew she was interested in the seat,” the report said. “He did so before learning, in further conversations with the president-elect, that the president-elect had ruled out communicating a preference for any one candidate.”
Mr. Emanuel was not available to answer a reporter’s questions on Tuesday, aides said, because he had left for a planned holiday trip to Africa with his family.
The report suggested that Mr. Obama had been more involved in thinking about his Senate successor than his public statements about the topic had indicated.
The report said that after Ms. Jarrett took herself out of the running for the Senate seat, citing Mr. Obama’s preference that she work for him in the White House, Mr. Obama authorized Mr. Emanuel to pass on the names of four people he considered highly qualified to take over his seat: Daniel W. Hynes, the state comptroller; Tammy Duckworth, the state veterans affairs director; and Representatives Jan Schakowsky and Jesse L. Jackson Jr., Chicago Democrats.
Mr. Obama later offered two other names, it said: Attorney General Lisa Madigan of Illinois and the Chicago Urban League president, Cheryle R. Jackson.
Those names were passed along by Mr. Emanuel in four calls to John Harris, the governor’s chief of staff, from early November through Dec. 8, one day before Mr. Blagojevich and Mr. Harris were arrested.
Mr. Emanuel, an Illinois congressman, was one of the few members of Mr. Obama’s inner circle who had a working relationship and talked occasionally with Mr. Blagojevich. But his contact with the governor was “totally appropriate,” Mr. Craig told reporters on Tuesday afternoon.
The only other name mentioned in the report was Dr. Eric Whitaker, a close friend of Mr. Obama, who was approached by a Blagojevich aide immediately after the election. The aide, the report said, “wanted to know who, if anyone, had the authority to speak for the president-elect.”
“The president-elect told Dr. Whitaker that no one was authorized to speak for him on the matter,” the report said. “The president-elect said that he had no interest in dictating the result of the selection process, and he would not do so, either directly or indirectly.”http://my.barackobama.com/page/dashboard/public/gGWdjc
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