Hmm. Sorry, folks. This does not sound like a man with nothing to hide.
The president-elect’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said today he wouldn’t go to the Chicago presidential transition offices in order to avoid reporters trying to ask him whether he had contact with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich about the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama’s election.
……
Back at his home, Emanuel appeared “beet-red,” according to an ABC News cameraman who was invited inside by Emanuel to use his bathroom this morning.
“I’m getting regular death threats. You’ve put my home address on national television. I’m pissed at the networks. You’ve intruded too much, ” Emanuel said, according to the cameraman.
……
Emanuel has refused to comment as to whether he is the un-named presidential adviser cited in the FBI affidavit filed in the Blagojevich case. “You’re wasting your time,” Emanuel told a Chicago Sun Times reporter yesterday. “I’m not going to say a word to you. I’m going to do this with my children. Don’t do that. I’m a father. I have two kids. I’m not going to do it.”
There are any number of sour notes here. (Please go read the whole story, ABC News has done a great job here at digging.) This sounds an awful lot like a man who has been advised not to say anything on the record that might come back to haunt him later (or who is politically savvy enough to know he is in a corner – pretty much the same thing). Even if Emanuel did nothing wrong in the legal sense of the word – and neither myself or ABC News is implying he did – there appears to be a real problem here. One that is making a reputedly very, very smart political operative nervous as hell.
That itself is telling.
Via Memeorandum
Perhaps Mr. Emmanuel should have a chat with Karl Rove about how to deal with it when your political enemies decide that your home and hearth are fair game, and and media et al decide that they don’t care.
One wonders how much of the left’s despicable bahavior over the past eight years was winked and chuckled at by the now red-faced Rahm Emmanuel.