Harry Reid Had Talks With Rod Blagojevich

Much has been made (at least here), about president-elect Barack Obama’s/Rahm Emanuel’s involvement in the Blagojevich scandal but there is another prominent Democrat who made several phone calls to Blagojevich and spoke directly with him about filling Obama’s senate seat. Harry Reid.

Now Harry Reid is defending his interference in a state issue. He is not denying that he spoke with Blagojevich but claims that Blagojevich is misrepresenting the conversations.

Harry Reid claims that Blagojevich is trying to deflect the attention away from himself by trying to implicate Harry Reid.

Gov. Blagojevich appears to be trying to distract attention from his daunting legal problems and damaged credibility by distorting information about private phone calls between himself and other public officials. It is regrettable and reprehensible

An admission by Harry Reid that he did talk to Blagojevich. Harry Reid is trying to separate himself from his conversations with Blagojevich but the fact is that he was in negotiations talks with Blagojevich about the senate seat.

Gov. Blagojevich’s efforts to try to tarnish others while the cloud of suspicion continues to grow over him are shameful, as are his efforts to further betray the public trust and sow seeds of division. As each day passes it becomes increasingly clear that Gov. Blagojevich is not fit to lead, and he should resign

Senator Reid, you were involved in the selection process to replace Obama’s senate seat with a man, who by all accounts, it was fairly obvious was illegally trying to sell that seat. Yet we are to believe that you didn’t understand what was going on.

Senator Reid had to have understood what Blagojevich was up to even if he wasn’t involved in any wrong-doing and now that Blagojevich has been caught he is trying to distance himself. Perhaps it is Harry Reid who should resign.

Senator Reid had no business meddling in a state affair in the first place and now that the corruption of Blagojevich has been made public he is running from where he shouldn’t have been.

Here is more from Harry Reid:

I am not going to get into a public debate with a guy accused of selling a Senate seat

But he was in private talks with the “guy accused of selling a Senate seat”, wasn’t he? And we will never know what exactly the conversations included, will we? And that is probably the way Harry Reid prefers it, we will never know what precisely what was said or inferred or negotiated, but the one thing that we do know is that Harry Reid talked to the “guy accused of selling a Senate seat” in private about that seat.

We are just supposed to take Harry Reid’s word for it that he had no idea what was going on.