The SEIU Smoking Gun: Did Obama lie about Blago seat?

by LaborUnionReport

We’ve theorized previously that there may be a smoking gun tying the connection between President Obama and ousted-Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich:  That smoking gun being the Service Employees International Union.

Blagojevich Corruption Probe

Well, the smell of gunpowder is filling the Illinois courtroom where Blago’s trial is still going on:

Top [SEIU] union leader Thomas Balanoff said he was at dinner the night before the November Presidential election when he got a call that was blocked.

So he didn’t take it.

Later he listened to his messages: “I walked outside, listened to it and it was from President Obama,” Balanoff said.

“Tom, this is Barack, give me a call,” the soon-to-be President-Elect said on the message.

After Balanoff sent word through an Obama aide to call him back, Obama returned his call later that night.

“Tom, I want to talk to you with regard to the Senate seat,” Obama told him.

Balanoff said Obama said he had two criteria: someone who was good for the citizens of Illinois and could be elected in 2010.

Obama said he wasn’t publicly coming out in support of anyone but he believed Valerie Jarrett would fit the bill.

“I would much prefer she (remain in the White House) but she does want to be Senator and she does meet those two criteria,” Balanoff said Obama told him. “I said: ‘thank you, I’m going to reach out to Gov. Blagojevich.”

Balanoff then described a Nov. 6, 2008 meeting he had with Rod Blagojevich to recommend Valerie Jarrett for Barack Obama’s Senate seat.

Though this is technically not a contradiction of then-President Elect Obama’s public “report” that there was no contact between he and Blagojevich, it does seem that SEIU top boss Tom Balanoff [shown here at a 2009 May Day rally] clearly served as the middleman between Obama and Blago.

The President-Elect had no contact or communication with Governor Blagojevich or members of his staff about the Senate seat. In various conversations with transition staff and others, the President-Elect expressed his preference that Valerie Jarrett work with him in the White House.

He also stated that he would neither stand in her way if she wanted to pursue the Senate seat nor actively seek to have her or any other particular candidate appointed to the vacancy.

According to Time.com:

Now, it is true, according to this testimony, that Obama never explicitly recommends Jarrett for the job. But it is also true that Balanoff understood the conversation to be, effectively, a recommendation. This sort of wink-wink communication is, it must be said, standard to Chicago politics, where smart politicians know a certain percentage of their peers are probably wire tapped by federal investigators, and another percentage are on their way to jail.

[snip]

The Balanoff disclosures stop short of incriminating Obama in Blagojevich’s allegedly criminal scheme. But they shed new doubt both on President Obama’s declared commitment to transparency and the credibility of the staff account of his role in the Blagojevich matter. If the Craig report chose to omit any mention of a conversation with a known go-between for Blagojevich, in which the President is, at least, understood to be recommending Jarrett, then there is no telling what other salient facts were also left out.

While the Obama administration’s parsing of words is reminiscent of another famous ‘parser’ (“…it depends on what ‘is’ is…”), given the fact that then-candidate Obama had pledged his allegiance to the SEIU, the ties that bind Blagojevich and Obama are clearly colored purple as they appear to be the middleman: SEIU’s Tom Balanoff.


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Posted Jul 1st 2010 at 6:03 am in Big Labor | 146 Comments