The Obama team has released its report of contacts between the Transition Team and Governor Blagojevich.
With regards to the question of whether or not anyone in Obama’s team talked with Blago about Obama’s replacement, the contacts are innocuous: the only Transition Team member who had any contacts was Rahm, who had "one or two" with Blago and four with John Harris. (According to Greg Craig, Rahm can’t remember whether it was one or two contacts with Blago.)
But curiously, the Obama team very narrowly crafted the question to cover only conversations about Obama’s replacement!!
I arranged for transition staff to provide accounts of any contacts that you or they may have had with Governor Blagojevich or his office in which the subject of your successor came up.
This, even though one of Blago’s conversations references "the 5th CD thing," suggesting an imminent conversation between Blago and Rahm about the special election to replace Rahm, White House Counsel to-be Greg Craig didn’t ask about such conversations.
In addition, on a conference call about the report, Craig stated that he hadn’t known about the Fox report that Rahm had tipped Fitzgerald off to Blago conversations; that seems like a worthwhile question to ask Rahm, don’t you think?
I will try to get some clarification on whether Craig even asked Rahm whether he had talked to Blago about his own replacement; but in the meantime, you can rest assured that Obama was not chumming it up with Blago directly.
Clarification:
As WO and MD point out, Rahm’s House seat does come up:
Soon after he decided to accept the President-Elect’s offer to serve as Chief of Staff in the White House, Mr. Emanuel placed a call to the Governor to give him a heads up that he was taking the Chief of Staff’s position in the White House, and to advise him that he would be resigning his seat in the House of Representatives. They spoke about Mr. Emanuel’s House seat, when he would be resigning and potential candidates to replace him.
My complaint about this report is that it is either amateur in its execution or deliberate in its narrowness, but they apparently never asked Rahm, "How many conversations did you have with Blago and Co about your OWN seat, in addition to the 5-6 that pertained to the Senate seat?" That seems like a really important question, not least because Blago was clearly intending to start further discussions about things of value for Rahm’s seat.