I gotta disagree, politely, with Ian’s statement that the SEIU statement is "rather uninformative." Here’s the statement again, from Communications Director Ramona Oliver:
We have no reason to believe that SEIU or any SEIU official was involved in any wrongdoing.
In keeping with the U.S. Attorney’s request, we are not sharing information with the media at this time.
That statement tells us two very important things:
- Fitzgerald (or someone at his office) spoke with the SEIU, having made requests to the union that it not share information with the media
- After having spoken to the SEIU, the union believes that "no SEIU official was involved in any wrongdoing"
Particularly given Fitz’s description of people coming forward to tell their sides of the story (and the damned familiarity of that "US Attorney’s request about not sharing information" from seeing it so often in the CIA Leak Case) I would imagine that Fitzgerald has heard SEIU’s side of any conversations with Blago, and found nothing much there to be interested in.
So, to answer Ian’s question:
Is any of this criminally corrupt? Was Harris reading in that SEIU was willing to do the 3 way deal? Was the request for a job effectively politely brushed off "gee, we’d love to, but ummm, other people are doing the work" or was it being seriously considered. It’s hard to tell from the what’s in Fitzgerald’s document.
I’d say that my experience with Fitz’s detailed indictments/complaints, coupled with the SEIU statement, leads me to believe that Fitz doesn’t believe any of the SEIU’s involvement was criminally corrupt. At least not as far as Fitz knows about thus far.