Obama anxious to correct media reports

President-elect Barack Obama said he’s anxious to “correct immediately” some media reports on transition team contacts with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, but would hold off until next week as promised to federal authorities. 

“It’s a little bit frustrating,” Obama said Wednesday at a Chicago news conference. “There’s been a lot of speculation in the press that I would love to correct immediately. We are abiding by the request of the U.S. attorney’s office, but it’s not going to be that long. By next week, you guys will have the answers to all your questions.” 

Obama didn’t elaborate on what reports he considered inaccurate. He said earlier this week that an internal review of the transition-Blagojevich contacts has been completed and shows no one on his staff acted inappropriately. 

Reports have surfaced that Obama’s incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel provided a list of Senate candidates to Blagojevich, and that Emanuel was tape-recorded speaking to Blagojevich 21 different times about filling the seat, as the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday. 

Blagojevich faces federal charges that he tried to barter Obama’s Senate seat for a Cabinet post or other high-paying job. 

Emanuel has refused to comment. But he got a vote of confidence Wednesday morning from Obama’s chief campaign strategist David Axelrod, who called Emanuel, a fellow Chicagoan, an “enormous asset” to Obama. 

Like Obama, Axelrod said he and other top aides are “hamstrung” in discussing any contacts with Blagojevich because of request by federal authorities. He said Obama’s internal review will make it “very clear” that the president-elect and his aides acted appropriately.

“Nobody is more eager than we are to be able to release that,” Axelrod, a senior Obama adviser, said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “And when you see it, it will corroborate what the president-elect has said, which is that he never spoke with the governor or any of his aides about this, and that there were no inappropriate discussions between members of his staff and the governor’s office in this matter.”

Axelrod also used the interview to minimize Obama’s connections to Blagojevich, twice noting that the president-elect didn’t support the indicted governor in his 2002 gubernatorial primary and portraying Obama’s eventual backing as obligatory support from a fellow “Democratic elected official.”

“There isn’t a person involved in Chicago politics who would tell you that Barack Obama and Rod Blagojevich had any kind of close relationship — they never did, they weren’t from the same political factions in Illinois politics and they weren’t close,” said Axelrod, a longtime political consultant in the Windy City and former Chicago Tribune political reporter.

Host Joe Scarborough, however, pressed Axelrod on a quote that appeared in a piece this summer by The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza in which incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel bragged that he and Obama played a central role in planning Blagojevich’s 2002 general election campaign for governor.

Axelrod said Emanuel had made a “casual comment” and subsequently conceded that his characterization was inaccurate. Obama’s involvement in Blagjoevich’s 2002 campaign amounted to attending “a couple of meetings,” Axelrod said.