President Trump has pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the previous Illinois governor who tried to promote the Senate seat of former President Barack Obama after he received the presidency in 2008.
“It’s my honor to do it. I’ve watched him,” Mr. Trump instructed reporters within the Oval Workplace on Monday in saying the anticipated transfer. “He was arrange by a variety of dangerous folks.”
Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat, served as governor from 2003 to 2009. He was impeached and eliminated on corruption costs associated to his solicitation of bribes to attempt to “promote” the Senate seat that Mr. Obama left open when he was elected president.
Beneath Illinois legislation, the governor would appoint somebody to the vacant seat, and federal prosecutors alleged that he sought rewards in return.
Upon his conviction, Mr. Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years in jail in 2011.
Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Blagojevich’s jail sentence in 2020, and now he’s taking it a step additional.
Their relationship goes again to 2010, when Mr. Blagojevich appeared on Mr. Trump’s “Celeb Apprentice.”
The governor vocally supported Mr. Trump in the course of the 2024 election cycle and attended the Republican Nationwide Conference. He defended Mr. Trump amid the a number of authorized circumstances in opposition to him.
“I really like Trump extra at the moment than ever!” he wrote in an X submit in Might after Mr. Trump was convicted in his New York hush-money case. “Once you’ve lived by way of it your self you acknowledge after they do it to another person. The political repair was in from the start.”
He spoke out in opposition to Mr. Obama, calling him a “menace to democracy” over the summer time and blamed him for former President Biden dropping out of the presidential race.
“It isn’t Donald Trump who’s an existential menace to our democracy,” he wrote in an op-ed on the time. “It’s Barack Obama.”
In an X submit from final month, Mr. Blagojevich mentioned he wasn’t “eyeing” an ambassadorship, and wasn’t asking Mr. Trump for “something.”
“I’m profoundly grateful to him for commuting my 14 12 months jail sentence and giving my daughters their father again,” he wrote. “What I’m in search of is justice and for the reality of the corrupt prosecution in opposition to me to be uncovered. If we’re going to save our democracy, lawfare and the weaponization of prosecutors for political functions should finish and people who have interaction in it should be delivered to account.”
Mr. Trump mentioned Monday that whereas he hadn’t beforehand thought of Mr. Blagojevich as an envoy, he “would” now think about it.
