President Donald Trump’s apparent campaign to turn the power of the federal government towards his personal political expedience intensified this week with reports that he was preparing to commute the prison sentence for former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. The former governor was originally charged with a slew of corruption allegations, including the perhaps most high-profile example of trying to exchange campaign contributions for an appointment to then new-President Barack Obama’s vacated Illinois Senate seat. Trump’s reported plan to commute the former official’s sentence comes after his wife, Patti, publicly seemingly tried to gain Trump’s favor by comparing those who prosecuted her husband to those investigating the president.
If Trump can be wooed to granting freedom to a duly convicted criminal this easily, that’s not exactly a good sign for the safety of the U.S. position on the world stage. Imagine how easily any given leader, like Putin, could convince him to carry out his wishes.
In this case, in April 2018, when Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation was in full swing, Patti Blagojevich insisted in an interview:
‘This same cast of characters that did this to my family are out there trying to do it to the president.’
The connection upon which she built her conspiracy was former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who brought the case against the former Illinois governor and then eventually served as a private lawyer for now former FBI Director James Comey, who led the Russia investigation before Mueller.
No matter the tenuous nature of the connection, Trump was apparently listening. The next month, during a conversation with reporters on Air Force One, he mockingly said that Blagojevich had been sent to jail simply “for being stupid.”
He’s also commented:
‘[Blagojevich has] been in jail for seven years over a phone call where nothing happens — over a phone call which he shouldn’t have said what he said, but it was braggadocio you would say. I would think that there have been many politicians — I’m not one of them, by the way — that have said a lot worse over the telephone.’
Actually, Trump is one of them — as has circulated widely by now, he used a phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to attempt to bribe Ukraine into investigating his domestic political opponents, including the Bidens.
Reportedly, in this case, Trump tasked son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner to work with the White House Counsel’s Office on preparing a commutation for the former governor.
Perhaps unsurprisingly considering how self-obsessed that Trump behaves, the former Illinois governor actually appeared on Trump’s long-defunct reality television show The Apprentice back in 2010, when he “had already been removed from office and was under indictment awaiting trial,” The Washington Post notes. During the episode in which he got kicked off the show, Trump lavished praise on the then already former governor, insisting:
‘Governor, I have great respect for you. I have great respect for your tenacity, for the fact that you just don’t give up.’
Now, that “great respect” has culminated in Trump using the power of his office to free the former governor from his 14 year prison sentence.
Thinking about the time Donald Trump scolded Rod Blagojevich on the Celebrity Apprentice over inaccurate Harry Potter facts and inadequate Harry Potter research pic.twitter.com/rx7PH7qP4I
— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) August 8, 2019
