According to the Chicago Sun-Times (your source for all the sordid details about Chicago politics that the media didn’t want you to know before November 4),
President-elect Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is reportedly on 21 different taped conversations by the feds—dealing with his boss’ vacant Senate seat!
Given Emanuel’s deserved reputations for smarts and toughness, it is likely he wasn’t approached by Blago on the pay-to-play conspiracy, but the prospect of blunt talk between the congressman and the governor about many subjects and people has to be unsettling to the president-elect and his most important aide.
Unfortunately for the incoming administration, once he’s indicted, Blagojevich is entitled to copies of all those tapes as part of the government’s responsibility to disclose all the evidence against him, which means that
the prospect of slow, selective leaking of parts of the exchanges is part of the calculation about political damage now underway at the office of the president-elect. The president-elect would be best served by calling on the U.S. Attorney to release any and all tapes between any of his advisor or staff and Blagojevich and his staff. Better to get all of the shop talk, however salty, out early and completely than drip by drip over the next few months.
It will be interesting to see if Barack Obama (or Rep. Emanuel) is savvy enough to do exactly that, or if the Obama team will instead follow the example of most politicians by turtling up and hoping for the best. In most cases, that’s a disastrous strategy which only maximizes the damage; however, given that during the campaign, the media made it work for the Obama team by sweeping everything under the rug as fast as they possibly could, they may well be tempted to try it again here. In this case, given that there’s a federal investigation involved, it isn’t likely to work, but you never know.