Nine days after Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested for trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat, FBI agents sat down with the president-elect. Two days later they sat down with Rahm Emanuel. What the two men said stayed sealed through two criminal trials, a Supreme Court petition and years of Freedom of Information Act litigation. This week, Fox News obtained the partially redacted FBI interview summaries and published what is in them.
As of Saturday, September 19, 2026, the records show Emanuel talking with Blagojevich’s circle about who should get the seat, with then-Attorney General Lisa Madigan among the names he floated. The Justice Department fought for years to keep those pages from the public.
Story Snapshot
- Obama was interviewed by the FBI on December 18, 2008; Emanuel on December 20, according to the FD-302 summaries Fox obtained.
- The summaries describe Emanuel’s conversations with the governor’s people about possible appointees, including Madigan.
- Three FD-302s (Obama, Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett) were withheld under FOIA exemptions; the D.C. Circuit sided with the government in 2020.
- Blagojevich was convicted and served nearly eight years before his sentence was commuted; the Obama team was never charged.
Where This Stands Right Now
The records are out and partially redacted. No new investigation has been announced. What has changed is that the public can now read, in the FBI’s own summary, what the incoming president and his chief of staff told agents while the governor was on wiretap talking about what the seat was worth to him. Obama’s transition team said at the time that its own internal review found no inappropriate contact, and the new pages do not show a deal. They show a lot of phone calls.
The unsealed FBI interviews provide additional context regarding discussions involving Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, and the vacant Illinois Senate seat.
— モーガン (@Morganuyz1) September 19, 2026
Why It Took 17 Years
Judicial Watch sued for the three interview forms in 2016. A federal judge ruled they were protected because Blagojevich’s appeals were still live; the D.C. Circuit affirmed in April 2020 on deliberative-process and work-product grounds. The forms stayed sealed after the appeals ended. Their release now, with the case long closed, is the part conservatives will notice: the government’s reasons for secrecy expired years ago, and the pages only surfaced when a news outlet got hold of them.
What Emanuel Was Doing
Court filings from the Blagojevich case already referred to a “president-elect advisor” in the wiretaps, widely understood to be Emanuel, passing along names the transition would find acceptable. The FD-302s add Emanuel’s own account of those conversations, including the Madigan idea, which was reported at the time as a way to get the governor a deal he could live with without giving him anything personally. The records do not allege Obama offered anything for the seat.
Why This Matters
The Obama years were sold as scandal-free. The FBI’s own paperwork from the first month of the transition shows the incoming White House working the phones on a Senate seat a governor was trying to sell, and shows the Justice Department spending years keeping that paperwork out of view. Readers can now judge the record for themselves, which is what the FOIA fight was about in the first place.
Sources:
foxnews.com, media.cadc.uscourts.gov, justice.gov, law.berkeley.edu, pbs.org, cbsnews.com
