Several news outlets have written about the governor’s “clout list” but, for whatever reason, nobody has ever published the whole thing, at least not that I’ve seen.
Here it is.
UPDATE: There are some obvious mistakes on the clout list. But try to remember that the list was created and maintained by the governor’s office, not by some media outlet.
UPDATE: Well, this sure is interesting.
The governor says a so-called “clout list” of politically connected hires by his administration was made up by disgruntled former employees. In this Intelligence Report: who’s behind the scheme and why.
The list of hundreds of state employees was posted Tuesday afternoon on a web site for political junkies called Capital Fax. The document has names, government agencies, payroll information, hire dates and political sponsor. Last week, it was described in news accounts and by the governor’s Republican opponent as a favors list. Tuesday, the governor’s office called it a fraud.
Governor Blagojevich and his staffers say they never saw the actual list until Tuesday, because the newspapers that had it refused to show them. The list, circa 2003, contained nearly 300 names and their so-called political clout, designated by initials or identified outright by their names.
But late Tuesday afternoon, the list was denounced as concocted by a top Blagojevich aide, spokeswoman Abby Ottenhoff, who told the I-Team the list “didn’t come from our office.” She claims “somebody created a document” and that the somebodys were “terminated employees making wild allegations” after being fired following allegations of corruption.
The clout list was concocted, according to the governor’s office, “to distract attention from themselves.” The governor’s staff does not believe that the list was dummied up by his Republican challenger, State Treasurer Judy Barr Topinka, or anyone connected to her campaign. […]
At Blagojevich’s unrelated news conference Tuesday afternoon, the governor himself hadn’t actually seen the disputed document. But Tuesday, sources in the governor’s office suggest that former officials of the Central Management Services illegally constructed the list after they were fired to make Blagojevich look bad.
Messages left for an attorney representing fired CMS employees have not been returned. Wherever the clout list came from, some of the information about people and the jobs they landed is correct, including one employee recommended by a congressman who got a job at the Illinois Department of Transportation as assistant to the assistant secretary for $94,000 a year.
This is supremely weird because the governor’s office has already admitted that it kept a list and that there was nothing wrong with it.