Government

Gameshow Host Pardons Former Contestant

Congratulations, Illinois, the most notoriously corrupt politician this side of Agnew is coming home!

By Liz Dye on February 19, 2020 11:17 am

Rod Blagojevich (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Can we dispense forever with the notion that Donald Trump has a plan? There is no nine-dimensional chess, no master strategy. There’s barely even object permanence. The president’s “plan” is to do as much damage as possible to his enemies and piss off liberals along the way. That’s it.

Case in point, Trump just waved his magic pardon wand over former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, despite the frantic warning from every single Republican in the Illinois congressional delegation that, “Commuting the sentence of Rod Blagojevich, who has a clear and documented record of egregious corruption, sets a dangerous precedent and goes against the trust voters place in elected officials.”

Trump’s own aides begged him not to give his blessing to a guy who got caught on tape trying to sell Barack Obama’s senate seat, particularly after Trump’s defenders just spent six months swearing that a visceral loathing of corruption forced him to hold up congressionally allocated defense funds for Ukraine. Because now the president “owns” this:

“I’ve got this thing, and it’s fucking golden. I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing,” said the sitting governor in 2008, musing that he would just “parachute” himself into Obama’s seat if he couldn’t find a buyer willing to pony up seven figures for it.

“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 phone,” Trump told reporters on August 7, 2019, just two weeks after he’d demanded that the Ukrainian president “do us a favor though” and announce an investigation of Joe Biden if he wanted to get that $391 million in U.S. military aid. At least he didn’t describe Blagojevich’s phone call as “perfect,” right?

And while prior presidents have relied on the Justice Department to vet pardon applicants, Trump prefers to run it by the Mar-a-Lago privy council, saying, “You know oftentimes, pretty much all the time, I really rely on the recommendations of people that know them.” Well, not all the time, since last week Trump called up Illinois Republicans who told him in no uncertain terms not to do this.

But Blagojevich’s wife Patti spent the past two years lobbying Trump on Fox News, complaining of the gross injustice of a former Apprentice contestant getting locked up far away from his kids like a common criminal who attempted to use state contracts to shake down campaign donations from a race track and a children’s hospital. Plus Jared Kushner promised that Democrats would be forced to applaud Blagojevich’s early release because he’s a member of their party. (And who could fault the instincts of the political wunderkind who convinced Trump that Democrats would be thrilled if he fired James Comey.)

Trump can’t even be bothered to pretend that this is something other than an exercise in sticking it to the libs, though.

“It was a prosecution by the same people, Comey, Fitzpatrick — the same group,” Trump told reporters yesterday, alluding to Patrick Fitzgerald (hello, dementia!), who prosecuted Blagojevich when he was U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and years later represent James Comey after he was fired by Trump.

And there’s your “process.” The enemy of my enemy gets a presidential pardon, but the hundreds of thousands of people locked up under three-strikes laws, mandatory minimums, or in the disastrous drug war, are shit outta luck.

Trump announces a blitz of pardons and commutations [Politico]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.