Your careful presentation of the options and nuances makes a lot of sense — and it's certainly much better presented than what the attorney quoted in the Politico article said. Granted: His remarks might have been pulled out of context, but I suspect he still could have been more astute about qualifying his remarks. Thanks for taking time to challenge me.

The first thing we need to keep in mind is that this scandal has both legal and political/PR aspects to it.

From the political/PR side, it makes perfect sense to conduct your own internal investigation and find out who said what to whom and when. If Obama is correct and neither he nor his staff had any involvement in the Senate seat auction everyone will come out smelling like roses.

From a legal perspective, however, it's a heck of a lot trickier. First, we don't know the full contents of the tapes. Therefore, we don't know if the prosecution has any compromising information on anyone in Obama's staff.

Second, there is no legal obligation on Obama or his transition team to cooperate with the prosecution (please distinguish “legal obligations” from politics/PR issues). Nobody's a target of the investigation, no subpoenas have been issued, and there are no signs that the investigation will broaden its scope to include them. To the entire world, they're clean. Yes, the Republicans are licking their chops, but that's politics and it should be dealt with in that context.

Finally, you do want to know what goes on in your shop. That doesn't mean you want to pledge to share your results with the world. If the Obama team discovers something “questionable” it raises the legal question of what to do about it. Whatever you choose to do, you can't ignore it, particularly because the prosecution may already know about it. You certainly can't destroy it – or at least, I would not advise a client to do that; if they want to go to jail, that's fine but I'm not losing my license over it. It's just a bad idea. Not to mention that if you find something, you may have to turn it over if it is demanded.

It's one thing to find out what happened. Obama needed to do that regardless. That doesn't mean you need commit to turning over every stone and looking at every telephone record or e-mail message.

Transparency is a great thing, but when it comes to the law, you never ask a question to which you don't already know the answer to. That is just what Obama did.