Yesterday afternoon I dialed into the Team Obama conference call to hear Robert Gibbs and Greg Craig walk through the 5-page report detailing contacts between the President-elect's Transition Team and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and his staff.

The call started 15 minutes late and lasted about 30 minutes. After Craig's presentation, he took maybe 6 or 7 questions. Surprisingly, no one asked what would seem to be the obvious question.

Page 66 of the indictment against Governor Blagojevich reads, "Later in the conversation, ROD BLAGOJEVICH said he knows that the President-elect wants Senate Candidate 1 [Valerie Jarrett] for the Senate seat but “they're not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them.”

How did Blago know he wasn't going to get anything but "appreciation" from Obama and his team for appointing Jarrett? Craig's report doesn't answer that question - even though Craig said yesterday he's "confident" he was made aware of and reported all contacts between the two camps.

There's also the matter of Rahm Emanuel's phone conversations.  Craig reports Emanuel had "one or two" phone conversations with Blagojevich.  Asked by a reporter why he couldn't say definitively whether it was one conversation or two conversations, Craig said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that Rahm had recalled his conversations from memory and wasn't absolutely sure whether it was "one or two."

Even as a matter of memory recall this is dubious (it's not like we're talking about 5 years or even 5 months ago), but shortly thereafter, when asked whether there were any audio tapes, emails or other documents that were going to be released, Craig said that he asked Emanuel and Jarrett to go back and "reconstruct" their previous contacts with the Blagojevich administration using phone bills, emails, etc. The point, of course, is that if Rahm had really done this it would be easy to say with certainty how many conversations he had with the Governor.

All of this, however, is merely parsing the details of a farce. I'm not suggesting there was any illegality or corruption on the part of Obama or his team, but rather ridiculing the idea that this was some sort of serious, credible review. A President-elect having his own incoming White House Counsel conduct an internal review that exonerates the President-elect and his staff is not what most people would consider to be a legitimate, independent investigation.

As Andrew Malcolm of the LA Times writes:

The Barack Obama presidential transition office today finally released its own report on its own internal investigation of its own contacts with legally challenged Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. And you'll be comforted to know the Obama folks found no impropriety whatsoever by Obama folks.

So go back to wrapping holiday presents or pretending you're working at your desk and checking out Obama's important abs. All is well with the coming World of Change.

Indeed, barring some new relevation you can expect the press to accept Craig's report as the last word on the matter . Time to get back to the regularly scheduled honeymoon programming.