Multiple reports suggest that President Donald Trump is expected to pardon former Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-IL) after commuting his sentence five years ago.
Blagojevich was sentenced to a fourteen-year term after being convicted on allegations of attempting to sell former President Barack Obama’s Senate seat following the 2008 election. Trump commuted his sentence in February 2020 after Blagojevich served nearly eight years of his term.
Citing an anonymous source, Axios first reported of the expected pardon. Fox News’s Danielle Wallace confirmed the report.
Trump and Blagojevich have a rapport that dates back at least 15 years when Blagojevich appeared on a star-studded season of NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice.
“I watched his wife on television; I don’t know him very well,” Trump said at the time of commuting his sentence, acknowledging they crossed paths on the show. “Seemed like a very nice person, don’t know him. … I did commute his sentence.”
Blagojevich served as Illinois governor from 2003-2009 before being arrested. He was tried in 2010 and 2011 and ultimately convicted on 18 felony counts led by his effort “to illegally trade the appointment of a United States Senator in exchange for $1.5 million in campaign contributions or other personal benefits,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Chicago stated. He was sentenced in December 2011.
During an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience in December, Blagojevich told podcaster Joe Rogan he was targeted by the Justice Department and convicted in a “total fucking frame-up.”
Blagojevich said he had been “chased” by federal prosecutors for five years when his phones began being wiretapped in 2008.
“When they began wiretapping my phones, which was late October 2008, everything I talked about doing with regard to the appointment of Obama’s successor to the United States Senate, I felt it was very possible they were listening. How could they not?” Blagojevich said, adding, “they were chasing me; they so much wanted to get me.”
Blagojevich said that prosecutors “invented the crimes from those conversations” and cherry-picked which recordings would be played in court and that he was denied the opportunity to play tapes that would corroborate his testimony.
“The jury didn’t know those tapes existed. It was a total fucking frame-up in a rigged criminal justice system in a court that was rigged,” he said. “And that’s today’s America and why what happened to Trump is so important. They did it to him in those different courts where they got the convictions for things that weren’t crimes.”
Blagojevich joined Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday for an exclusive interview on April 1, 2023, days after Trump was indicted in the Manhattan Business records case. Blagojevich said Trump was indicted because he challenges the political establishment.
“It’s very simple. It’s because he’s challenging the establishment. He won’t play ball, he won’t do things their way,” he said. “He’s approaching government and doing things differently. And as a result of that, he’s a threat not only to the Democrats, but he threatens the traditional Washington, DC, elite country club Republicans.”
My heart goes out to President Trump and his family. The hardest part of being on the receiving end of the politics of persecution and personal destruction is not the pain it brings to you, but the pain it brings to your family. Still, you can’t give in. It’s not a time to do… pic.twitter.com/l5vq36J1HP
— Rod Blagojevich (@realBlagojevich) April 1, 2023
“This is what happens when you truly take on the establishment. This is what happens when you truly are out there. Keeping your promises to the people, shake things up,” he added. “And I think the political cynics, which is most of the people in that business, were surprised that when Trump actually won, he actually was doing the things he said he was going to do when he was running. They just think when you say those things, this is just the stuff you say to get elected.”
