My word is good. I followed Jim Lad's link. It took some work to get past the Fox News rha-rah on the page, and find a link to actual information, but i did. Here it is, unedited, from the Chicago Tribune. sorry this is a long paste, but I want everyone to see what Jim Lad steered us to, so we can all judge the level of malfeasance....
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" Antoin "Tony" Rezko is a well-regarded, politically connected housing developer, Barack Obama an up-and-coming community organizer. After Obama is named president of the Harvard Law Review, Rezko offers Obama a job building inner-city homes with his Rezmar Corp. Obama declines, but a friendship and political alliance begins.   The Obamas and Rezkos dined occasionally and the Obamas once spent a day at the Rezkos' Lake Geneva retreat.

In subsequent years, Rezko will help bankroll Obama's campaigns, except his presidential bid.

At Rezko's request, Obama drops in at a business meeting for Middle Eastern bankers. The New York Times has cited Rezko business partners who thought Rezko was seeking to impress the foreign guests, potential investors in his business ventures. Obama says he could recall only one instance when he and Rezko discussed recommendations for appointments to state jobs, boards or commissions.

Obama is sworn in to the U.S. Senate. Bolstered by payments for his best-selling autobiography and advances for future books, the Obamas' combined income topped $1.67 million. They go home-shopping and are drawn to a 96-year-old, South Side Georgian revival home with four fireplaces, glass-door bookcases fashioned from Honduran mahogany and a wine cellar with space for 1,000 bottles. The house and the adjoining yard had been owned as a single property. But now the owners are listing them separately, asking $1.95 million for the house and $625,000 for the garden lot. Obama disclosed in the March interview that someone else already had an option to buy the garden lot. But he said Rezko took over that option after Rezko learned Obama was bidding for the house. Obama said he knew next to nothing about those transactions and does not recall when he learned that Rezko was interested in buying the side lot—or even how Rezko learned it was for sale. But they talked about the upcoming sales. "He said, 'I might be interested,'." Obama recalled. "My response was, 'Well, that would be fine.'." Obama added: "This is an area where I can see a lapse in judgment."

Between Jan. 15 and Jan. 23, Obama submits three bids: $1.3 million on Jan. 15; $1.5 million on Jan. 21; and $1.65 million on Jan. 23. He told the Tribune that he does not recall when he learned that Rezko was interested in buying the side lot, or how Rezko learned of the sale. But Obama raised the possibility that he was the first to bring the lot to Rezko's attention. The senator's campaign provided a copy of a previously released e-mail from the sellers. In response to questions from the Obama campaign, the sellers agreed that they "did not offer or give the Obamas a 'discount' on the house price" because Rezko paid their asking price for the yard. "Tony asked me during the course of one of these conversations why I might not be interested in buying the lot and keep the property intact. And I said that, you know, it wasn't worth it to us to spend an extra $600,000 or so on a lot next door when Michelle and I were really interested in the house. So, he said, 'Well, I might be interested in purchasing the lot.' And my response was, 'That would be fine.' "And my thinking at the time, and this is just to sort of flag this, this is an area where I can see sort of a lapse in judgment. Where I could have said, 'You know, I'm not sure that's a great idea.' But my view at the time when he expressed an interest was that he was a developer in this area that owned lots, that he thought it was going to be a good investment. And my interest, or my motivation was here's somebody that I knew who, if this lot was being developed, it'd be better to have somebody who knew, who I knew, who you know would give me schedules, keep me apprised of what was taking place and so forth. So I didn't object."

At some point before the sale closes, Obama tours the property with Rezko for 15 to 30 minutes, a fact the Obama campaign disclosed this February. The campaign said Obama wanted Rezko's opinion of the property because Rezko was a real estate developer in the area. In previous accounts of the purchase, Obama did not divulge the tour. In 2006, he told the Tribune that he recalled talking to Rezko about the potential home purchase "either at an event or some conversation we had where they mentioned to me that they either knew the property or knew the developer or something like that. …I actually asked him what he thought of the house and he thought it was a good house. And I said, 'I'm looking at putting in a bid on it.' And from that point on I just worked through my real estate broker, purchased the property. "He said, 'I'd be willing to go inside and take a look,'." Obama recalled. He said in the March interview that he simply didn't disclose the walk-through previously because he did not feel the information was salient and insisted the tour didn't mean he and Rezko coordinated their purchases. "The fact that he had taken a physical tour was not something that I thought was new information."

In the months preceding Obama's June 2005 purchase of his home, Rezko had already become a controversial figure in Chicago and Illinois politics. In March 2005, for example, city officials alleged that a minority contractor at O'Hare International Airport acted as a front for a Rezko firm. Then in May, Rezko reportedly was among several to receive Cook County grand jury subpoenas in a joint county-state investigation of jobs and campaign contributions in Blagojevich's administration. Subsequent reports showed a federal grand jury asked the state teachers' pension system for records involving Rezko and other political insiders. Obama said he was aware of the growing controversies. "I started reading the reports that were surfacing and — I'll be honest with you, that, on the couple of occasions that it came up, he gave me assurances that ..... he was not doing anything wrong. And that it wasn't a problem. And there's not doubt that, as things evolved, I became more concerned. But again, this is somebody who, in his interactions with me, had always been above board, and so, my instinct was to believe him." And, Obama added, "at that time, the news around Rezko's problems had not elevated to the levels that they did later."
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