The last thing Sen. Barack Obama and Gov. Rod Blagojevich needed was that letter written by convicted Illinois influence peddler Tony Rezko promising he'd never rat out his pals.

The imprisoned political fixer insisted that federal prosecutors are squeezing him, according to an exclusive Tribune report written by federal courts reporter Jeff Coen for Thursday's paper.

"They are pressuring me to tell them the `wrong' things that I supposedly know about Governor Blagojevich and Senator Obama," the fundraiser (and Obama's personal real estate fairy) wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve.

"I have never been a party to any wrongdoing that involved the Governor or the Senator," Rezko argued. "I will never fabricate lies about anyone else for selfish purposes. I will take whatever comes my way, but I will never hurt innocent people."

  It's Rezko saying he was pressured to say the "wrong" things that he knows about Blagojevich and Obama.  That's by John Kass.  He refers to Coen's article, which you pointed us to at the time.

  In June of 2007 Tim Novak wrote a piece questioning and partly refuting Obama's claim he never did Rezko favors in return for the campaign money he raised for Obama's campaign.  One would need to prove Obama wrote the letters as a favor in kind rather than as a favor for someone who was a fundraiser and friend.  I myself will not be forgetting that Obama at one point outright said that Rezko's buying the lot next door to him, accessible only via his house, was merely a coincidence.  That was during his board interviews this year.

  Add that Rezko was guilty of wilful neglect of that housing he built and the tenants involved, with no heat for them in the winter of Chicago.  Complaints by the tenants, say his state senate staff, would have been forwarded to the agencies reponsible for handling them and they don't recall  complaints coming in.
  The Rezko/Obama legacy is told by the Boston Globe.  But it's shared by the horror that is Chicago politics in general.  

  Obama has chosen a really FINE choice for housing for the country (from NY) and it's been encouraging for those who worried he might include some of the horrible Chicago entities involved in housing there.

  The Chicago Sun-Times's Natasha Korecki reported on Rezko's letter in much the same vein that Chicago Tribune did.

While I personally hope and do think that Obama will surely stay in to continue the good work he's begun as P-E, it stymies me that investigative net people totally dismissed or dismiss stories like this over the last year as meaningful where Obama is concerned.  I think he's safer from investigation because he is going to be President.

Surely, it seems Dems say, Rezko's words don't mean that the prosecutors were interested in Blagojevich and Obama.

 There is SOME reason to worry, but I don't think Fitzgerald is at this point willing to go after Obama's part in Chicago's everyday trade/barter/favors environment.  

  Obama needed the machine to get where he is now, and with our economy in extremely dire straits there is now a strong reason for FitzgeraldTeam not to go after him, regardless of what Rezko wrote they were pressuring him to do.

 With all the reading about it I've done, there's little doubt in my mind that the prosecutors were interested in Rezko favors from Obama in return for his intense fundraising for Obama, not to mention Obama's activity around the Health Planning Boards that Fitzgerald is now concentrating on.  I've already linked to that this week and prefer not to repeat it here.

  What Fitzgerald said in his recent press conference re Blago was that Obama is not involved in this flurry of activity around the Senate seat.  (We now are told they have 21 separate tapes of Rahm's calls with BlagoTeam/Harris recently and that Rahm passed on a list of whom Obama would find "acceptable" -- interestingly not mentioning Jesse Jackson, Jr. -- but it's obvious to me that they will not find any dealmaking by Rahm, though there is a question about a possibility 2 yrs down the road, which is not what I'd even begin to call a deal).

 Chicago Tribune coming out with the news of wiretaps caused Fitzgerald to stop exploring and to do the arrest now lest there be more that is 'undone' now that the taping was known.

  It's such a mess, but I think some in ObamaTeam worry about Rezko/Blagojevich and what they'll say about pre Obama-Senate-Seat-Selling news.  Chicago is a messy place.  

  Obama decides whether to keep Fitzgerald or not, once he's in.  Remember, in Rezko's trial, a witness said that Rezko told him not to worry -- that when Obama became President, Fitzgerald would be out.  Because of that statement in the trial, it's unlikely that Obama would do that.  At least I hope he doesn't.

 Maybe Fitzgerald will just decide not to go after Obama because the stakes from that now involve the world and trust in our administration.  

But it won't be because there was no interest by him prior to this in Obama's involvement.  I think Rezko wrote that letter as a sort of notice to Blagojevich and Obama, actually.