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National

Obama Calls On Blagojevich To Step Down

By Steve Inskeep,  Don Gonyea
Published December 11, 2008 at 8:57 AM PST
This story was published more than 16 years ago.

President-elect Barack Obama made his most extensive comments yet about the scandal involving the governor of Illinois, speaking at a news conference in Chicago on Thursday. Federal prosecutors say Gov. Rod Blagojevich tried to put a U.S. Senate seat up for sale — the seat that Obama once held.

Obama said the governor should step down. He also said he was "absolutely certain" his office was not involved in any deal-making around the Senate seat.

"That I'm absolutely certain of," he said. "That would be a violation of everything that this campaign has been about. That's not how we do business."

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The topic took over a news conference that was supposed to be about Obama's new health care policy team, which includes former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle, Obama's choice for health and human services secretary.

Obama took four questions; three of them were about the Blagojevich scandal.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

National
Steve Inskeep
Steve Inskeep is a host of NPR's Morning Edition, as well as NPR's morning news podcast Up First.
Don Gonyea
You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.
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