"Did I try to buy the seat? Never," Sen. Roland Burris, D-Ill., told reporters this morning. "Did I commit perjury? No."

The freshman senator is referring, as you might have guessed, to the news about what he said to the brother of then-governor Rod Blagojevich back in November.

As the AP writes, Burris promised to "personally do something" for Blagojevich's campaign fund while pressing for the governor to appoint him to President Barack Obama's former Senate seat, according to a wiretap transcript released Tuesday.

Today, though, Burris insisted that:

"If you look at the transcript you can see what I was saying. ... I did not know anything about a pay-to-play. I knew if I raised money, it would be a problem."