Late yesterday, I told you that the governor’s office was claiming that the “clout list,” which has been reported on by several news organizations, but posted in full for the first time yesterday right here on my blog, was a fake.
Both NBC5 and ABC7 did stories last night about the list being posted on this site.
What some call a “clout list” or a “favors list” or even a “personal tracking list” was supposedly made public Tuesday.
It’s a list that kept track of state hires tied to hundreds of politically-connected friends of the governor’s office and NBC5’s Phil Rogers reported that now we know who’s on it.
The governor’s list has been in the news for the last week, but until Tuesday, it had not actually been seen by anyone in the media.
Not to quibble, but the AP published excerpts from the list, including names of political sponsors, last week, so I’m pretty sure they saw the whole thing. I assume the Sun-Times saw it as well, since they’re the ones who broke the story. Lee Newspapers claims to have obtained the complete list last Friday.
Strangely enough, though, the governor’s people maintain that no reporters would share the list with them and they didn’t see it until yesterday, when I put the whole thing online.
Governor Blagojevich and his staffers say they never saw the actual list until Tuesday, because the newspapers that had it refused to show them. […]
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.
Even weirder, none of the media outlets which originally reported on the list last week have reported today on the governor’s office claims that the list is a fake. Lee ran a story on the list this morning, but nothing about the denials was mentioned.
Most, but not all, of the information on the list has already been confirmed by the media outlets which ran the original stories, so I’m not quite sure what’s going on here. I do know that there’s a lot more coming from the original source of this list, and that the list is supposedly just the tip of the iceberg.
Stay tuned.