Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich speaks with attendees throughout a Serbs for Trump 2024 occasion at RWB Milwaukee bar throughout the Republican Nationwide Conference, July 17, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Armando L. Sanchez | Chicago Tribune | Getty Photographs
President Donald Trump on Monday issued a full pardon to former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
Blagojevich, 68, who was a Democrat whereas in workplace had served eight years in jail on prices stemming from his effort to promote Barack Obama’s Senate seat after Obama received the 2008 presidential election.
“It is my pleasure,” Trump mentioned throughout remarks within the Oval Workplace, including, “I feel he is a really high quality particular person this could they’ve occurred to him.”
Trump commuted Blagojevich’s 14-year sentence in 2020.
Axios first reported on Trump’s plans to pardon Blagojevich.
Blagojevich was convicted in 2009 of mendacity to an FBI agent. Jurors deadlocked on different counts. At his 2011 retrial, he was discovered responsible on all counts, after authorities recordings revealed his makes an attempt to promote Obama’s seat. He was additionally convicted of shaking down a kids’s hospital govt for marketing campaign contributions and holding up a invoice involving the horse-racing business in trade for marketing campaign contributions.
In between the trials, he was a contestant on Trump’s actuality TV present “The Superstar Apprentice” in 2010.
Blagojevich was impeached and expelled from workplace in January 2009 after he refused to resign after his arrest the earlier yr on a litany of corruption prices.
Blagojevich’s longtime lawyer Shelly Sorosky on Monday known as the potential of a pardon one thing that is been “on the radar” for a while. Sorosky went on to explain Blagojevich and Trump having a “good, pleasant relationship.”
NBC Information was unable to contact Blagojevich for touch upon Monday.
For years, Blagojevich’s identify was synonymous with corruption in Illinois, after FBI recordings revealed his musings about buying and selling authorities actions for private profit.
In 2019, Illinois’ Republican Congressional delegation despatched Trump a letter asking him to not commute the previous governor’s sentence, saying it despatched a fallacious message. Trump, in his first time period, commuted his time period anyway.
“It is vital that we take a powerful stand towards pay-to-play politics, particularly in Illinois the place 4 of our final eight Governors have gone to federal jail for public corruption,” they wrote. “Commuting the sentence of Rod Blagojevich, who has a transparent and documented file of egregious corruption, units a harmful precedent and goes towards the belief voters place in elected officers.”