The story shifts yet again.

I really hope they aren’t playing as fast and loose with the G as they have been with the media. Because if they are, some people are going to jail.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s patronage chief routinely met with other hiring officials to discuss job applicants and their political sponsors for positions that were supposed to be free from clout, sources involved with the process say.

Blagojevich aides say they created a complex system to prevent hiring officials from seeing the names of candidates seeking so-called civil service jobs, providing an extra layer of security to ensure politics was not a factor in doling out the jobs.

But even after the system was established, the sources said, patronage officials and others in the governor’s office still knew applicants’ names and discussed their clout at meetings to decide whether to fill positions.

The meetings were going on for at least the first two years of the Blagojevich administration, according to the sources, when the bulk of the jobs were filled.

Blagojevich spokeswoman Abby Ottenhoff said meetings were held through March 2004 to decide what positions should be filled at state agencies, not who should fill them.

While not acknowledging that discussions about the identities of job candidates and their sponsors took place, Ottenhoff said there would be nothing improper about it because those applicants would still have had gone through the regular hiring process.

My syndicated newspaper column this week is about this same topic.

But if they weren’t doing anything wrong, then why did they change the way they hired people when the feds started sniffing around?

Shortly after federal investigators launched a probe into Gov. Blagojevich’s hiring practices, his administration overhauled the way it awards state jobs, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.

The changes, detailed in documents obtained by the newspaper, drastically scaled back the hiring duties of the governor’s personnel office and chief of staff. They took effect in January of this year — about two months after the feds peppered the governor’s office and three state agencies with subpoenas for job placement records.

Disclosure of the changes comes as Blagojevich fights accusations that job candidates’ political connections, not their qualifications, played roles in hiring decisions in possible violation of the law. No one in the governor’s office has been charged with any crime, and the feds have declined to comment about the hiring probe.

Blagojevich spokeswoman Abby Ottenhoff insisted the changes did not hinge on investigators’ inquiries but were the result of the governor’s success in cutting the state’s payroll. […]

But a flow chart of the system obtained by the Sun-Times shows that Blagojevich’s personnel office and deputy chiefs of staff exercised close oversight of job vacancies, that a closed-door committee met weekly to approve or deny all job postings, and that the governor’s chief of staff had final say on who got all jobs.

A high-level state government source familiar with ePAR, speaking on condition of anonymity, described it as “an early warning system for political hiring” — an assessment the administration flatly denies.

The source said ePAR slowed the hiring process, giving some candidates with political ties time to be placed ahead in line for open positions, including low- and mid-level jobs protected under a U.S. Supreme Court decree called Rutan. Politics is not supposed to play any role in the hiring of such court-protected positions, which make up the bulk of state government jobs.

“It was their opportunity for them to see positions before anyone else knew about them,” the source said of the governor’s office. “When an opportunity presented itself, they made sure their candidates got these jobs.”

The source knew of at least three politically connected candidates who got jobs in part because of ePAR delays in getting positions filled. In one case, a candidate at first was deemed unqualified for a Rutan-protected job but apparently was allowed to reapply. On the second try, the candidate was hired, the source said.

Big trouble, campers. Big, big trouble.