After more than one false alarm raised and dashed the hopes of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, President Donald Trump finally answered his pleas and commuted Blagojevich’s 14-year prison term Tuesday, springing the Chicago Democrat from prison more than four years early and writing a stunning new chapter to one of the state’s most notorious corruption cases.
Before boarding a United Airlines flight in Colorado, after being released from federal custody Tuesday evening, Blagojevich thanked Trump for the commutation, saying he was eager to get home.
“What he did was I think something that deserves a great amount of appreciation on my part personally, and he has from me my deepest, most profound and everlasting gratitude,” Blagojevich, donning a dark suit jacket, said to reporters. “I can’t wait to get home. I miss my daughters. I miss my wife. I miss home.”
Trump’s controversial move came more than a year after he first revealed he was considering ending Blagojevich’s time behind bars, saying he believed Illinois’ 40th governor had been treated unfairly.
“Yes, we commuted the sentence of Rod Blagojevich,” Trump said in Maryland on Tuesday. “He served eight years in jail, a long time. He seems like a very nice person — don’t know him.”
Trump said Blagojevich’s daughters have only seen their father wearing prison garb in recent years, and he thought of them as he made his decision.
“He’ll be able to go back home with his family,” Trump said. “That was a tremendously powerful, ridiculous sentence in my opinion.”
The move disregarded the political concerns of top elected Republicans in Illinois in a critical election year. And it came on a day when Trump also granted a full pardon to former 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr., as well as to financier Michael Milken and former New York City police Commissioner Bernard Kerik.
Chicago now will need to prepare itself for the return of one of its most notorious sons, a politician known for his dense hair and loquaciousness.
Shortly before 4 p.m., Blagojevich’s sister-in-law, former Chicago Ald. Deb Mell, briefly spoke to the media before going inside his family’s Ravenswood Manor home on the city’s Northwest Side.
“I’m shaking. It’s crazy,” Mell said, adding that her sister Patti Blagojevich was “thrilled.” Patti Blagojevich tweeted Tuesday evening that there would be homecoming news conference at the family’s home Wednesday morning.
Throughout his first term, Trump had repeatedly dangled the suggestion of freeing Blagojevich, who appeared briefly on the president’s former “Celebrity Apprentice” show. Trump often cited what he characterized as the former governor’s harsh sentence while not mentioning the details that sent him to prison — including trying to sell the Senate seat of then-President-elect Barack Obama for personal or political enrichment.
He last raised the prospect in August, when he told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was “very strongly” considering issuing a commutation to Blagojevich, who was scheduled to be released from federal prison in March 2024.
Blagojevich’s campaign for commutation
Blagojevich, now 63, served as governor starting in 2003, was reelected in 2006 despite a swirl of federal investigations, and was impeached and removed from office in 2009.
He was convicted in June 2011 and sentenced to 14 years on corruption charges. In addition to the proposed sale of Obama’s Senate seat, Blagojevich also was convicted of trying to shake down executives from a children’s hospital and the horse-racing industry for campaign contributions in exchange for official acts in office.
It was the Senate seat scheme that produced the most well-known line of his trial, from a conversation secretly recorded by the government: “I’ve got this thing and it’s (expletive) golden…I’m not just giving it up for (expletive) nothing.”
In commuting his sentence, Trump added another chapter to one of the state’s most notorious corruption cases, one that led to the first impeachment of a governor in Illinois’ scandal-tarred history.
Trump essentially became Blagojevich’s last hope for any reprieve after the U.S. Supreme Court in April 2018 declined to take up the ex-governor’s appeal.
Within weeks, Blagojevich and his legal team embarked on a calculated public relations campaign attacking the ex-governor’s conviction as unjust and politically motivated.
On Memorial Day 2018, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece by Blagojevich under the headline, “I’m in Prison for Practicing Politics.” It began by saying that the “rule of law is under assault in America.”
Blagojevich’s legal team filed a formal request for executive clemency with the U.S. Department of Justice in June 2018.
Meanwhile, Patti Blagojevich made repeated appearances on national cable news — most notably Fox News, Trump’s favorite — to try to link her husband’s prosecution to the investigation by then-special counsel Robert Mueller into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump’s decision to commute Blagojevich’s sentence only affected his incarceration, ending his time in prison, but did not absolve him of the underlying convictions, as a full pardon would have done.
Critics decry Trump’s decision
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker was among the politicians to issue a statement Tuesday criticizing the move.
“Illinoisans have endured far too much corruption, and we must send a message to politicians that corrupt practices will no longer be tolerated,” the statement read. “President Trump has abused his pardon power in inexplicable ways to reward his friends and condone corruption, and I deeply believe this pardon sends the wrong message at the wrong time.”
Also issuing a statement were the attorneys who made up the team of prosecutors who handled the Blagojevich trials in U.S. District Court in Chicago. That group included former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, and his former assistants Reid Schar, Chris Niewoehner and Carrie Hamilton, who is now a judge, who pointed out that both the appellate and Supreme Courts affirmed the conviction and sentence.
“The appellate court described the evidence against him as ‘overwhelming,'” the statement read in part. “Extortion by a public official is a very serious crime, routinely prosecuted throughout the United States whenever, as here, it can be detected and proven. That has to be the case in America: a justice system must hold public officials accountable for corruption. It would be unfair to their victims and the public to do otherwise.”
Sam Adam Jr., Blagojevich’s lead defense lawyer at his first trial, said Tuesday he couldn’t be happier for the former governor.
“I’m ecstatic for the family, for those two girls,” Adam said. “For President Trump to do this, it unites a family. Fourteen years was simply too long, and it’s taken a lot for this to happen.”
In a statement following Trump’s announcement, the White House noted that Democrats such as Illinois’ senior senator, Dick Durbin, and veteran U.S. Reps. Bobby Rush and Danny Davis, along with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, had backed a shortened prison sentence for Blagojevich.
“During his confinement, Mr. Blagojevich has demonstrated exemplary character, devoting himself to improving the lives of his fellow prisoners,” the White House said.
Illinois’ Republican congressional delegation had twice weighed in strongly against a commutation of Blagojevich’s sentence, first in June 2018 and again in August 2019. On Tuesday, the five-member delegation sent out a joint statement saying they were “disappointed” by Trump’s decision and calling Blagojevich “the face of public corruption in Illinois.”
“As our state continues to grapple with political corruption, we shouldn’t let those who breached the public trust off the hook,” said the statement from Adam Kinzinger of Channahon, Darin LaHood of Dunlap, John Shimkus of Collinsville, Rodney Davis of Taylorville, Mike Bost of Murphysboro. “History will not judge Rod Blagojevich well.”
Tuesday evening, as he boarded the flight back to Chicago, a gray-haired Blagojevich, when asked what he’d learned from his time in prison, spoke once again about what he perceives as an unfair judicial system, prone to oversentencing. He’s also gotten closer to God, he said.
“It’s a broken criminal justice system and it’s an unfair criminal justice system,” he said. “It’s a criminal justice system with too many people who have too much power who don’t have any accountability, and they can railroad people.
“I saw how it affects people of color and how on cases with nonviolent first offender drug offenders that they’re made to do decades of prison time, for things, for mistakes that they made, for wrongs they committed that any fair-minded society would not allow,” he said.
Trump and the Justice Department
In speaking previously about Blagojevich, Trump sought to tie the former governor to figures in the Justice Department whom the president has sought to criticize for investigations of the administration.
In August, of Blagojevich, Trump said, “And a lot of people thought it was unfair, like a lot of other things — and it was the same gang, the Comey gang and all these sleazebags that did it.”
The president was referring to former FBI Director James Comey, a frequent Trump target who he contends sought to politicize the nation’s top law enforcement agency in the 2016 election in which Trump faced Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. After taking office, the president fired Comey amid the investigation into Russia’s interference in the election and whether the Trump campaign was involved.
The president’s comments mirrored what Patti Blagojevich has said in not-so-veiled attempts to link her husband’s prosecution to some of Trump’s perceived political enemies.
In reality, Comey was in private practice from 2005 to 2013 — virtually the entire time Blagojevich was investigated and prosecuted. And Blagojevich’s prosecution was launched by a Justice Department under the George W. Bush White House.
Republicans in the state, already facing a serious disadvantage in Illinois in the 2020 presidential election year, having lost the governor’s mansion and the wealth of Bruce Rauner in 2018, had previously warned Trump against acting to free Blagojevich.
Trump lost Illinois to Clinton by 17 percentage points in 2016, and two congressional seats in the traditionally Republican suburban and exurban region shifted to Democrats in 2018. That left Democrats with a 13-5 advantage over Republicans in the state’s congressional delegation.
Northwest Side scene
As the day passed Tuesday and word of the commutation spread, the scene in front of Blagojevich’s home on the Northwest Side grew more chaotic. News reporters swarmed the house, television trucks and cars crowded the streets, and Chicago police officers routinely circled the neighborhood.
A helicopter hovered overhead. Blagojevich’s family dog barked at the reporters outside the home. Some people yelled at the media as they drove by, while others slowed down, trying to take photos on their phones.
Shortly after 2 p.m., one Chicago man came to show his support for Blagojevich. Ziff Sistrunk put a letter in Blagojevich’s mailbox after no one answered the door.
He then spoke briefly to the media before hanging a sign on the railing in front of Blagojevich’s house that read, “Thank you, Mr. President.”
Chicago Tribune’s Javonte Anderson, Gregory Pratt, Jamie Munks and Dan Petrella contributed.
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