Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was on the witness stand testifying in his own defense in federal court, chattering on in typical form and telling jurors about a 2002 fundraiser that was held for him at Yankee Stadium.
“First time I met Donald Trump,” Blagojevich proudly recalled of the occasion in New York City, “he walked in with Regis Philbin and made a contribution at that event.”
He would see the real estate tycoon again years later, of course, when the indicted and impeached Blagojevich was a hapless contestant on “The Celebrity Apprentice” reality TV show and Trump “fired” him in his role as its bombastic host.
Maybe they should stop meeting like this. But now the former governor has Trump to thank for an unlikely new twist in The Blago Show.
The Chicago political jester who rose from life as a scrappy city kid to the state’s highest office — then secretly taped by the FBI in a corruption probe, arrested at home before dawn, tried (twice), convicted and sentenced — was sprung from federal prison Tuesday more than four years early when Trump commuted his sentence.
Never drama-free
The 40th governor of Illinois, who often ran the state from his home library on the North Side of Chicago, was a speechifier with a trademark shelf of dark hair who often prompted eyerolls as he randomly worked historical and sports references like potter’s clay.
Set up two news cameras anywhere, and Blagojevich would find them.
Most of America was barely paying attention, however, until the FBI appeared at his door in December 2008 as he was about to take his habitual morning run. The first memory of Blagojevich for many is him staring blankly out from a mug shot while wearing a tracksuit after his arrest.
Blagojevich has long portrayed himself as all talk and no crime, telling jurors at his second trial he was just trying to set up a political deal and not really selling the U.S. Senate seat Barack Obama vacated when he became president in 2008.
He never lined his own pockets while being captured on tape saying he would take certain official actions as governor if those with a stake in his decisions made campaign contributions, Blagojevich’s defense lawyers liked to point out. Everyone knew he was more style than substance and constantly ran at the mouth, they said.
But federal prosecutors called his conduct blatant corruption and self-dealing, their case punctuated by weeks of recorded phone calls where Blagojevich can be heard scheming to bring in campaign money and get himself a new job or government post. He had many ideas on how to trade the Senate seat, which he infamously described as a thing he had that was “(expletive) golden.”
As for his ultimate failure to bring in money for himself, prosecutors argued, if a police officer asks you for a bribe to get out of a speeding ticket and you refuse, it’s still a crime for that officer to even ask.
Jurors in the second trial reached a sweeping guilty verdict, saying Blagojevich’s testimony had not moved them. One told the Tribune at the time that while Blagojevich was on the stand, “People were writing ‘blah, blah, blah’ in their notebooks and I drew pictures of my cats.”
The fourth former Illinois governor to be convicted in a criminal case since 1973, Blagojevich was sentenced in December 2011 by U.S. District Judge James Zagel, who had made it clear at several points during the proceedings that he had grown tired of the shenanigans of Blagojevich the governor and defendant.
It was a few years after former Illinois Gov. George Ryan’s 6 1/2-year sentence had been given partly as a deterrent to corrupt Illinois politicians. With Blagojevich and perhaps others seemingly not getting the message, Zagel handed down a stiff 14-year prison term that was to have kept him behind bars until March 2024.
An ask for Trump
After the Supreme Court in April 2018 decided not to hear what appeared to be Blagojevich’s final appeal, the former governor and his wife, Patti, played the only card they had left: a direct plea for clemency from Trump, a politician of Blagojevich’s own ilk.
The effort included Blagojevich penning an essay in The Wall Street Journal a month later in which he once again told anyone who would listen that he was being punished for the kind of fundraising and deal-making that is routine in American politics.
“I learned the hard way what happens when an investigation comes up empty after the government has invested time, resources and manpower,” he wrote. “When they can’t prove a crime, they create one. Did you know that an elected official asking for a campaign contribution is the same as a dirty cop asking a motorist for a cash bribe to tear up a speeding ticket? I never did.”
And then, perhaps directly to a president who was facing his own high-stakes investigation:
“Politically motivated prosecutors can now interfere with and undo free and fair elections,” he wrote.
Patti Blagojevich, who has done her best to keep her husband’s case in the spotlight during the years he has been away from her and the couple’s two daughters, sent Trump her own message. She made TV appearances on his favorite channel, Fox News, to say that the same people who took down her husband were now targeting Trump.
The president apparently listened. Trump stopped short of a full pardon for Blagojevich but made the controversial move to commute his sentence this week after telling reporters he thought Blagojevich had been “treated unbelievably unfairly.”
“He served eight years in jail. That’s a long time and I watched his wife on television. I don’t know him very well,” Trump said as he explained his decision Tuesday while standing on a tarmac in Maryland. “I met him a couple of times. He was for a short while on ‘The (Celebrity) Apprentice’ years ago. Seemed like a very nice person. Don’t know him.”
The president continued, saying many people disagreed with the length of Blagojevich’s sentence and adding that he thought of the Blagojevich daughters, now 23 and 16, as he decided to free their father.
“They rarely get to see their father outside of an orange uniform,” Trump said. “I saw that and I did commute his sentence. So he’ll be able to go back home with his family after serving eight years in jail. That was a tremendously powerful, ridiculous sentence in my opinion and in the opinion of many others.”
Neighborhood kid makes good
Blagojevich grew up in the Cragin neighborhood on the Northwest Side, the second son of Serbian immigrants.
He has always been proud of his Chicago DNA, highlighting his working-class upbringing often during his various campaigns. His mother was a Chicago Transit Authority ticket taker, he liked to recall, and his father was a worker at the old A. Finkl steel factory and an owner of laundromats.
Blagojevich was an average gangly Chicago kid who often hung out in the local park playing basketball, ever in the shadow of his older brother, Robert, a better student and athlete who would go on to a military career. The future Illinois governor was shaky with the books and on the sports field as well, including running up a completely average record as a Golden Gloves boxer.
As a young man, his idols included Elvis and a number of politicians, Richard Nixon among them, and he decided early on that law school and politics would be his future.
After time at Northwestern University, where he never really fit in, he made his way to California and Pepperdine University in Malibu, where he remained a distracted student but eventually earned a law degree. Blagojevich always knew he would return to Chicago, where legendary Chicago Ald. Ed Vrdolyak was among his early political patrons.
Blagojevich worked for Vrdolyak right out of law school, clerking on personal injury and workers’ compensation cases. And by 1986, after a few more stops, he landed at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, then run by future Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Again, Blagojevich failed to distinguish himself.
But away from his paid job, he had been recruited by Vrdolyak to do political legwork, helping out in aldermanic races. One place he was sent was the office of then-Ald. Dick Mell, where he did Mell’s bidding and later met the alderman’s daughter and Blagojevich’s future wife, Patti, at a fundraiser.
Blagojevich eventually became Mell’s top staffer and was unveiled as a candidate himself in 1992, running for and winning a seat in the General Assembly with Mell’s backing. The Tribune covered Blagojevich’s political debut that January in a short story that misspelled his name “Blagojewevick.”
Four years later, it was up the ladder to Congress, as Blagojevich recovered the 5th Congressional District for the Democrats after longtime Rep. Dan Rostenkowski had lost it to a Republican during Rostenkowski’s corruption scandal. A Tribune reporter caught up to Blagojevich the morning after that election as he thanked voters at the Jefferson Park CTA station on the Northwest Side.
“Our next campaign begins as soon as we’re done with this ‘L’ stop,” he said.
That constant war footing would become a hallmark of Blagojevich’s political career, as he often took criticism for being a perpetual candidate instead of focusing on the work at hand once he won office. And in both Springfield and Washington, Blagojevich was often viewed as voting along the lines of what was good for him politically, and not taking many stands beyond vaguely fighting for the working man.
One congressional highlight came in 1999 when Blagojevich traveled to Yugoslavia with the Rev. Jesse Jackson to help bring about the release of three U.S. soldiers who had been captured during the conflict there. Blagojevich’s language skills were seen as key in meetings with Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic.
But as usual, Blagojevich was soon looking ahead. In 2000, Gov. George Ryan became bogged down by what would become known as the licenses-for-bribes scandal, and Blagojevich sensed the weakness.
Ryan would not seek reelection, and Blagojevich would overcome a collection of opponents to first be elected governor in 2002. He saw it as a chance to separate himself from Mell politically, after tiring of being teased as “Representative Son-in-law” by those who thought he had just ridden Mell’s coattails.
A prolific fundraiser
One way Blagojevich could assert his own political strength was through piling up campaign contributions, and by many accounts, it became his main priority before and after he was made the state’s chief executive.
But what many politicians may do with whispers behind closed doors, Blagojevich did noisily. That was reward political donors with jobs and other spoils of government.
As the first Democrat elected to the state’s highest office in some 30 years, there was significant pent-up demand for jobs and positions for loyalists on that side of the aisle. What amounted to Blagojevich’s patronage office was run through close confidants Chris Kelly and Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who simply moved their focus over from pure fundraising once Blagojevich took office.
Rumors and tips quickly flowed to federal authorities, even before a public flap with Mell seemed to out Blagojevich’s questionable fundraising tactics. During a falling-out between the two, the governor shut down a Will County landfill with family links to Mell’s wife, Marge, and Mell retaliated in the press by complaining about Blagojevich’s relationship with Kelly and alleging appointments to boards and commissions were being made for those who gave campaign money.
An early federal probe coalesced into an investigation known as “Operation Board Games,” where federal authorities looked into whether state panels had been corrupted to give insiders the ability to get kickbacks and siphon money from state contracts. At the center of the probe was Rezko, who was indicted on a charge of influence peddling in October 2006, just a month before Blagojevich was elected to a second term.
Blagojevich’s name repeatedly was dragged into Rezko’s trial in 2008, but he was hanging on politically going into that fall. His challenges were many, as he fought an uphill battle to fundraise amid all the bad press and watched as another Illinois politician — Barack Obama — lived Blagojevich’s dream of riding a wave of political momentum toward the White House.
Those willing to get on the phone to raise money for Blagojevich or go into the field to press their contacts had shrunk to a small band of loyalists and lobbyists, including his brother, Robert, who had come up temporarily from Tennessee to help, and Lon Monk, a longtime friend Blagojevich had met at Pepperdine and his former chief of staff.
Another was John Wyma, a close adviser who had been Blagojevich’s chief of staff in Congress. That fall, Wyma also was a lobbyist for Children’s Memorial Hospital, which Blagojevich targeted for fundraising tied to the governor’s plan to boost state aid to the facility.
Wyma became alarmed by such aggressive Blagojevich fundraising plans that fall, attending two meetings at the governor’s campaign headquarters that he later said unnerved him.
And it was poor timing for the governor, as Wyma himself was under investigation for lobbying activities for a hospital plan that had moved through a state board Rezko had stacked with loyalists. Wyma told the FBI what he had heard at the meetings, allowing federal investigators to win permission from a judge to bug the campaign office.
The rest, as they say, is history, as that taping led to full-fledged wiretaps on phones of players in the Blagojevich camp, and on the line to his home office.
Just days before his arrest, Blagojevich was recorded talking to his brother, Robert, about a possible deal to name then-U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. to the Senate seat in exchange for $1.5 million in campaign cash.
Allies of Jackson in Chicago’s Indian community had made the pledge to Robert previously, with one of them holding up one finger on one hand and five on the other to communicate the amount. That person apparently really meant $6 million, but that was neither here nor there at the time of the recorded phone call.
Blagojevich wanted his brother to tell the Jackson representative that fundraising would have to start immediately if he made Jackson the senator.
“Now you gotta be careful how you express that,” Blagojevich told his brother. “And assume everybody’s listening, the whole world is listening.”
A fresh start
Blagojevich’s trial testimony was, not surprisingly, filled with historical references, and while they may have only inspired one juror’s cat drawings, they did shed light on how the former governor’s mind works.
“I’ve used these examples — sometimes the press goes out and says I compare myself to Winston Churchill or Gandhi or somebody like that, I’m not doing that,” Blagojevich testified.
“But those are historical figures who I have great admiration for and you can, I believe, draw life lessons from their lives, their struggles, how they dealt with adversities, the things, the principles, the purposes that they committed their lives to.”
His biggest adversity was most likely his years as federal inmate 40892-424.
Blagojevich tried to make the best of it. He taught history to inmates and was lead singer in a band known as the Jailhouse Rockers.
But it was undoubtedly brutal. He spent years away from his two daughters, missing holidays and birthdays and graduations. Prison for him was in Colorado, and family trips to see him were not routine.
At his sentencing hearing before Zagel, it was clear Blagojevich could see it coming. Much of the bravado was gone. His tearful family was nearby in the courtroom gallery, and the former governor was visibly wrestling with his emotions.
“My life is ruined,” he said. “I have nobody to blame but myself for my stupidity and actions and words and what I thought I could do. I’m not blaming anybody.”
He may still not be blaming anybody, but he is thanking somebody. And that person is Donald Trump, president of the United States, who showed him a long-awaited kindness.
Now Rod Blagojevich’s life begins again.
