Burris pleads on taped call for Senate seat

? Sen. Roland Burris promised to “personally do something” for Rod Blagojevich’s campaign fund while pressing for the then-Illinois governor to appoint him to President Barack Obama’s former Senate seat, according to a wiretap transcript released Tuesday.

“Tell Rod to keep me in mind for that seat, would ya?” Burris tells Robert Blagojevich, who headed his brother’s campaign fund, in a Nov. 13 phone conversation secretly taped by the FBI.

The remark came after Robert Blagojevich urged Burris to “keep me in mind and you know if you guys can just write checks that’d be fine, if we can’t find a way for you to tie in.”

“OK, OK, well we, we, I, I will personally do something, OK,” Burris says.

Earlier in the conversation, Burris and Robert Blagojevich explored the possibility that Burris might raise campaign money on a larger scale.

“I know I could give him a check,” Burris said. “Myself.”

Burris attorney Timothy Wright said Tuesday that Burris never wrote any checks to the Blagojevich campaign following the conversation. Burris, a former Illinois attorney general, had donated to Blagojevich’s campaigns previously.