Nearly five years after commuting former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s federal prison sentence, President Donald Trump on Monday granted a full pardon to the disgraced former governor who was convicted more than 13 years ago on an array of corruption charges, including fundraising schemes and attempting to sell a U.S. Senate seat for his personal benefit.
Blagojevich, outside his Ravenswood Manor home late Monday hours after the president officially signed the pardon, told reporters he learned personally from Trump a few weeks ago that the move was imminent. He said he had the “deepest and most profound and everlasting gratitude for President Trump for what he’s done today for the full presidential pardon.”
“I think about my relationship with President Trump and it’s really, well, he’s always doing things for me and he never asks me to do anything for him,” Blagojevich said. “President Trump is a man who, when he sees things that are wrong, he rights them. Puts an end to them.”
In signing the pardon in the Oval Office later Monday, Trump called Blagojevich a “very fine person” and said it was time to “let him have a normal life.”
The pardon comes as the president is also said to be considering Blagojevich as the next U.S. ambassador to Serbia, where the former governor’s family comes from. Though he was a Democrat while he was an elected state representative, congressman and governor, Blagojevich became a devout Trump political disciple after receiving his commutation Feb. 18, 2020.
Asked whether he’s considering appointing Blagojevich the ambassador to Serbia, Trump said Monday, “No, but I would.” Blagojevich declined to comment Monday about the ambassadorship possibility or running for public office again, noting that his wife, Patti, is not a fan of the idea.
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Unlike the commutation, which left intact Blagojevich’s federal conviction, the Trump presidential pardon wipes clean the criminal slate of the only Illinois governor to be impeached and convicted by the General Assembly and banned from seeking any state elected office ever again. It is doubtful the Trump pardon would allow Blagojevich to seek state office since the courts have ruled that impeachment is a political — not criminal — process. State pension officials, though, are studying whether Blagojevich’s state legislative pension could be restored.
How many presidential pardons or sentence commutations have been granted to people from Illinois?
Illinois’ senior U.S. senator, Dick Durbin, a Democrat, criticized Trump’s pardon of Blagojevich.
“In a state with more than its fair share of public corruption, the Blagojevich chapter still looms as one of the worst,” Durbin said in a statement. “America and Serbia deserve better.”
If he had served his full prison sentence, Blagojevich would have been released in May of last year. At the time of Trump’s commutation, Blagojevich had served eight years of a 14-year sentence in a Colorado prison.
After Trump’s 2020 commutation, Blagojevich returned to his Ravenswood Manor home — one of numerous locations where federal agents had secretly taped him and where he also had been arrested on Dec. 9, 2008.
Hours after the arrest, then-U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald detailed elements of what he called “a political corruption crime spree,” which also included attempting to shake down a children’s hospital for campaign donations, that he said “would make Lincoln roll over in his grave.” It also prompted then-FBI Special Agent Robert Grant, who headed the Chicago office, to declare that if Illinois wasn’t the most corrupt state in the union, “it’s certainly one hell of a competitor.”
A Trump move pardoning Blagojevich continues a second-term presidential theme of “reality TV” serving as a basis for many of Trump’s actions, including placing TV stars who had previously appeared on reality shows in presidential administrative posts.
Pete Hegseth, a former weekend Fox News co-host, now serves as defense secretary, and former MTV “Real World” star and Fox Business News host Sean Duffy is transportation secretary. Trump has nominated Linda McMahon, the former head of wrestling’s WWE and his previous Small Business Administration administrator, as education secretary, and former TV doctor and unsuccessful Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate Mehmet Oz as head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The pardon continues a relationship Blagojevich began with Trump in 2010 when the impeached governor — conducting a high-profile series of pre-trial TV appearances to declare his innocence — appeared on Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” show, only to be bounced by the future president for his lack of knowledge of “Harry Potter” and ineptness in using a laptop and cell phone.
“Governor, I have great respect for you,” Trump told the state’s former chief executive as he fired him. “I have great respect for your tenacity, for the fact that you just don’t give up.” Trump later told the show’s producer, Mark Burnett: “I feel badly for him. He tried, but I feel badly,” according to the Washington Post.
Blagojevich was tried twice in the federal case. The first ended with him being convicted on just one charge, lying to the FBI. When he was re-tried in 2011, he was convicted in connection with essentially three distinct schemes, including the attempted sale of then-President-elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat, which, as governor, Blagojevich had the sole power to fill. He was found guilty on 11 criminal counts related to the Senate seat and six counts involving fundraising shakedowns of a hospital executive and racetrack owner. Five counts related to the Senate seat charges were later dismissed on appeal.
In December 2011, federal Judge James Zagel sentenced Blagojevich to 14 years in prison. He began serving his time a few months later.
Throughout his first term as president, Trump had repeatedly made suggestions about freeing Blagojevich, criticizing the length of the prison sentence but never discussing the criminal acts that led to them, including trying to auction off the appointment to Obama’s Senate seat for personal or political benefit.
Apparently helping drive Trump’s thoughts were repeated appearances on his favorite channel, Fox News, by Blagojevich’s wife, who is the daughter of former Chicago North Side ward boss Dick Mell. She frequently invoked allegations of a politicized Department of Justice system being used to prosecute her husband — a subject of interest to Trump — though she often misstated facts about the prosecution.
Patti Blagojevich did her own stint on the short-lived reality show “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here,” when a judge would not let her husband travel to Costa Rica.
On Monday, Trump referenced the Blagojevich case and tied it to his own legal issues, which the president repeatedly claims have been politically motivated.
“It was a sort of a terrible injustice. They just were after him,” Trump told reporters Monday about Blagojevich. “It’s my honor to do it. I watched him. He was set up by a lot of bad people — some of the same people that I had to deal with.”
Blagojevich also painted himself as a victim of a wrongful prosecution, saying he “broke no laws, crossed no lines, never took a penny” and said the allegations that led to his conviction were “fake charges.”
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Blagojevich also lamented the “weaponization of prosecutors for political purposes.” And he sought to compare his legal woes with those of Trump, who was convicted in New York City on state felony charges in his hush money trial, and faced charges in other criminal cases, including for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
“A terrible thing that they did to me, a Democrat governor,” Blagojevich said. “Even worse what they did to a Republican President, President Trump.”
Blagojevich’s name has surfaced in news reports as being under consideration by Trump to serve as ambassador to Serbia. Blagojevich’s father, who once was a steelworker at the former A. Finkl site on the North Side, was of Serbian descent, and the self-described “Trumpocrat” headed up a “Serbs for Trump” rally during last year’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Blagojevich’s ties to Serbia are perhaps best known from his time in Congress when, in 1999, he joined the Rev. Jesse Jackson as Jackson helped broker the release of three American prisoners in Serbia.
Speaking at the RNC event for nearly a half-hour, Blagojevich sought to portray both himself and Trump, convicted in a felony “hush money” case in New York, as victims of “a corrupt system that we have now in America.” Afterward, an unrepentant Blagojevich called both men’s convictions “fraudulent.”
Last month, after being asked about the ambassadorship, Blagojevich used social media to say: “I’m not eyeing it. I’m not asking President Trump for anything. I’m profoundly grateful to him for commuting my 14 year prison sentence and giving my daughter’s their father back.”
Blagojevich said: “What I am seeking is justice and for the truth of the corrupt prosecution against me to be exposed. If we are going to save our democracy, lawfare and the weaponization of prosecutors for political purposes must end and those who engage in it must be brought to account.”
Trump has already nominated for an ambassadorship a convicted felon he pardoned four years ago. Charles Kushner, father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, was nominated as U.S. ambassador to France. In 2020 Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 felonies, including tax evasion, witness tampering and making illegal campaign donations.
Former Gov. Pat Quinn, who was Blagojevich’s lieutenant governor and took over for Blagojevich after he was impeached and removed from office, said Trump’s pardon “blessed political corruption in Illinois.”
Two GOP members of Illinois’ congressional delegation, U.S. Reps. Mike Bost of Murphysboro and Darin LaHood of Peoria, co-signed a letter to Trump in 2018 expressing their concerns about granting clemency to Blagojevich. Both men said during the RNC that the former governor’s case can’t be compared to Trump’s.
LaHood, a former federal prosecutor, said he thought Trump’s 2020 commutation of Blagojevich’s sentence sent the wrong message.
“President Trump talks about draining the swamp,” LaHood said at the convention. “Nothing exemplifies the swamp more than Rod Blagojevich and his actions.”
On Monday, LaHood said in a statement that while he respects Trump’s authority to pardon who he sees fit, doing so for Blagojevich “was a mistake.”
“Former Gov. Blagojevich has a clear and documented record of egregious corruption and has been criminally convicted by a jury,” LaHood said. “This decision harms the faith and trust citizens have in our justice system.”
Democratic Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza, who voted to impeach Blagojevich when she served in the House, lashed out at him Monday for showing no remorse and doubling down on his denials when “he knows what he did.”
“We did the right thing, which was to hold Gov. Blagojevich accountable for trying to extort the president of a children’s hospital and trying to sell the Senate seat,” she said of the House impeachment. “The fact that he did those things can never be erased.”
Blagojevich never acknowledged public guilt for his actions. But one of his best views of the public was one he never thought would become public — a Nov. 4, 2008, phone call with an aide taped by federal agents just weeks before his arrest following a baiduhai poll showing only 13% of voters approved of his job performance as governor.
“I (expletive) busted my ass and pissed people off and gave your grandmother a free (expletive) ride on a bus. OK? I gave your (expletive) baby a chance to have health care. And what do I get for that? Only 13% of you all out there think I’m doing a good job. So (expletive) all of you,” Blagojevich said.
Tribune reporter Dan Petrella contributed.