Team Obama "investigation" - What a joke.

Major Garrett at Fox News shows that the Team Obama investigation was an even bigger joke that most would assume. My prior posting read Greg Craig's carefully crafted words as indicating that he allowed the staff to write their responses to his question. In fact, his contact was with each staff member's lawyer. Garrett reports:

Major Garrett at Fox News shows that the Team Obama investigation was an even bigger joke that most would assume. My prior posting read Greg Craig's carefully crafted words as indicating that he allowed the staff to write their responses to his question. In fact, his contact was with each staff member's lawyer. Garrett reports:

Greg Craig, the incoming White House Counsel, conducted his inquiry by taking
questions to each transition staff member's lawyer. The lawyers then went to the
staff members and collected the answers. The lawyers then gave the answers to
Craig.

Garret reports one rather funny example. Craig quotes Valerie Jarrett as describing Blagojevich's suggestion he might be appointed secretary of health and human services as "ridiculous" in her conversation with the Illinois head of the Service Employees International Union.

Did Craig get that quotation from Ms. Jarrett in an interview or from a memo she provided him? No. Her attorney told Craig that she said that.

Ben Smith provides a little context for the quote:

Jarrett, Craig said, took it not as a suggestion of a quid pro quo, but as "a
random comment that was, on the face of it, ridiculous."

"She thought it was ridiculous for the governor of Illinois to talk about being appointed to Barack Obama's Cabinet at a time when he was being investigated," Craig said, adding that he was passing on what Jarrett's lawyer had said.

That detail -- like many others -- paint the governor as extremely isolated, and viewed as seriously out of touch even by people, like Balanoff, in regular contact with him.

Thus, the quote advances Team Obama's portrait of Blagojevich as "isolated" and "out of touch." This in no way answers whether he approached Team Obama with an offer to sell the Senate seat. Instead, it says that any such conduct arose out of his isolation and irrationality rather than his close contact with Obama in Chicago politics.

Thus, it tells people that they should never think that Obama's prior conduct led Blagojevich to think he would participate in the transaction; only Blagojevich's own irrationality led to his conduct.