Illinois Republicans Warn Trump Against Letting Rod Blagojevich Out of Jail Early

By James Hohmann, The Washington Post

10 August 19

 

HE BIG IDEA: Illinois Republicans do not want President Trump to spare the Rod. 

All five GOP members of the state’s congressional delegation issued a joint statement on Thursday night urging Trump not to go through with his desire to commute the sentence of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich (D).

“It’s important that we take a strong stand against pay-to-play politics, especially in Illinois where four of our last eight Governors have gone to federal prison for public corruption,” said Reps. Darin LaHood, John Shimkus, Adam Kinzinger, Rodney Davis and Mike Bost. “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.”

In the Land of Lincoln, they’re not alone. Local Republicans are disturbed that Trump would set free a disgraced Democrat — who, not coincidentally, was a contestant on his reality television show — after serving only half of his prison sentence. Blago, as friend and foe alike called him when he was the state’s chief executive from 2003 through 2009, became the personification of the swampiness and seediness that Trump promised he’d fight against in 2016.

The 62-year-old is not supposed to be released from a minimum-security prison in Colorado until May 2024. The U.S. Supreme Court has declined on multiple occasions to hear Blagojevich’s appeals. In fact, Trump’s own solicitor general said in a court filing last year that the ex-governor’s challenges to his convictions were “unwarranted.”

The Republican minority leader of the Illinois state House, Jim Durkin, said this is “part of a theme” in which Trump tries to appeal to “certain groups in the United States who don't believe in the federal government.” He added that Trump would “send the signal that corruption is not that bad” if he commutes Blagojevich’s sentence.

“I don’t think he understands the different levels of corruption which the former governor was convicted of,” Durkin told the Southern Illinoisan, a downstate paper. “It doesn't seem to be what the founding fathers believed that the executive power should be about.”

Blagojevich, who as a former prosecutor knew the laws he was breaking, was convicted of 17 counts of wire fraud, attempted extortion, soliciting bribes and conspiracy in 2011. He was impeached by the state House and then removed from office on a unanimous vote by the state senate in 2009. He was run out of the state capitol in Springfield with an approval rating of 8 percent.

Blagojevich was charged with trying to sell to the highest bidder the U.S. Senate seat that opened when Barack Obama became president. Initially, he wanted to trade the appointment of Valerie Jarrett in exchange for Obama picking him as secretary of health and human services. When the president-elect’s intermediaries rebuffed him, he turned elsewhere and wondered how much he could get for appointing someone else to the seat. He also thought about naming himself. “I've got this thing and it's [expletive] golden. And I'm just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing,” Blagojevich said on a court-authorized FBI wiretap that was played during his trial.

At his trial, prosecutors laid out compelling evidence that Blagojevich sought to rescind $8 million in state funding for Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago because the chief executive of the hospital wouldn’t make a $50,000 contribution. He refused to sign a bill that financially benefited racetracks until the owner of a racetrack cut a $100,000 check to his campaign. As one of the prosecutors put it during trial, Blagojevich’s scheming “would make Abraham Lincoln roll over in his grave.”

-- Trump has begun to have “second thoughts” as he recognizes that going forward with his planned commutation would generate a political firestorm that could last for days, Maggie Haberman reports in today’s New York Times: “White House officials had said the move could come as early as this week. … The president decided this week that he would commute the sentence, according to two people with knowledge of the talks. … Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser who has internally championed pardons and commutations, had suggested Mr. Blagojevich be pardoned, according to one administration official. … Mr. Kushner said it would appeal to Democrats.”

Kushner, 38, has been passionate about criminal justice since his father, Charles, a wealthy real estate developer, served 14 months in prison for tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign contributions. Charles Kushner paid a prostitute $10,000 to seduce his brother-in-law (Jared’s uncle) in a hotel room set up with hidden cameras to record the rendezvous. He later instructed a private detective to mail the tape to his sister as a warning and wanted to arrive at her house shortly before a family party, records show. Instead, she took the tape to the FBI, which led to his arrest.

-- Trump tweeted last night that the Blagojevich “matter” is under “review” by “staff”: “Many people have asked that I study the possibility of commuting his sentence in that it was a very severe one. White House staff is continuing the review of this matter.”

-- That sounded like a walk-back compared to what he said Wednesday night aboard Air Force One. Trump told reporters that he is “very strongly” thinking of commuting Blagojevich’s sentence because he was “treated unbelievably unfairly.” The unexpected five-minute riff appeared to be, at least in part, a gambit to get reporters to talk about something beyond the apparent lack of empathy he showed during his stops in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, where mass shootings over the weekend left a combined 31 dead. But, just as with those tragedies, Trump made it about himself. He began his comments by dubiously linking Blagojevich’s conviction to James Comey “and all these sleazebags.”

“It was the same gang — the Comey gang,” he said, referring to the FBI director he fired. “I think he was treated very, very unfairly, just as others were. Just as others were.”

The “others” appears to be a reference to himself. Someone appears to have put the false notion in the president’s head that Comey, whom he loathes, was involved. Patrick Fitzgerald was the U.S. attorney who locked Blagojevich up, and he’s friendly with Comey. But Comey was not in government during the prosecution. In fact, he didn’t become FBI director until two years after Blagojevich’s conviction.

-- Blagojevich’s wife, Patti, has aggressively lobbied on her husband’s behalf by making as many appearances as she can on Fox News, knowing that the president watches the cable channel. This appears to have made a difference. “I’m very impressed with his wife,” Trump told reporters. “She’s one hell of a woman. … She goes on, and she makes her case.”

Speaking aboard the presidential jet, Trump also made the preposterous observation that the criminal justice system treats white-collar criminals much more harshly than blue-collar criminals. “You have drug dealers that get not even 30 days, and they’ve killed 25 people,” he said.

And the president played down the significance of Blagojevich mulling, on a wiretap, how he could sell a Senate seat to the highest bidder. Trump noted that “nothing happened” after the phone call, and that the governor wasn’t ultimately paid for the appointment. “He shouldn’t have said what he said, but it was braggadocio,” the president said. “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 telephones.”

-- After these comments, Patti Blagojevich expressed delight that her husband might soon be a free man. But most everyone else who was a party to the case was aghast:

“It had nothing at all to do with Jim Comey,” said retired FBI agent Robert Grant, the special agent in charge of the Chicago field office during the investigation. In a sit-down interview yesterday with the Chicago CBS affiliate, he said the ex-governor should serve his full sentence. “It’s using the levers of power to take money from people for your own purposes. That’s corruption,” Grant explained. “Blagojevich has to accept responsibility before anyone should even consider a commutation of his sentence.”

The forewoman of the jury that convicted Blagojevich emphasized the thoroughness of their deliberations. Connie Wilson said the governor’s young children were in the back of her mind during deliberations, but he clearly committed crimes that hurt the whole state. “We did our job,” Wilson explained to the Windy City’s CBS station last night. “We were very careful about making sure that — when you’re dealing with somebody’s life — we really wanted to get it right.”

The judge in the case, James Zagel, has noted that the 14 years he gave Blagojevich was less than the 15 to 20 years that prosecutors asked for. “The harm here is not measured in the value of property or money,” Zagel said at sentencing. “The harm is the erosion of public trust in the government.”

-- Commuting Blagojevich’s sentence would not only make an end run around the justice system, nullifying the considered judgment of a jury of his peers that heard all the evidence and weighed arguments from both sides. It would also diminish the gravity of political corruption writ large. In that sense, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising: Trump has repeatedly shown disdain for the rule of law as president.

“This seems like it's all part of the president trying to make political scandal seem like no big thing,” “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd said on MSNBC last night. “Or of trying to convince Americans that cronyism and pay-for-play and quid pro quo is just how it works in Washington, that everybody does it. And, maybe, if it’s not fair to punish Blagojevich for political corruption, then it’s not fair to punish anyone else it now, is it? Especially a former president.”

-- Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) noted that Trump is working outside the traditional Justice Department process for clemency, and she criticized him for using his power to help allies and friends, including former Dick Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby and ousted Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. She could have added conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza and Conrad Black, who wrote an adulatory book about Trump, to her list.

“The governor disgraced his office. He’s one of the few governors in the history of the country that’s been impeached,” Lightfoot said at a news conference, according to the Chicago radio station WBEZ. “He didn’t take seriously the incredible magnitude of the power which he held, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard any contrition on his part.”

-- Today’s Chicago Tribune includes a blistering editorial that both upbraids Trump for his demonstrably false statements about the facts of the case and explains why it would be an affront to the honest citizens of Illinois — the true victims of Blagojevich’s corruption — if his sentence gets commuted.

“The ‘Comey gang’ did not overzealously prosecute the former governor. The former governor overzealously abused his position in state government and got caught,” the state’s biggest newspaper notes. “Keep in mind that Blagojevich ran for office on a platform of ethics reform after replacing a disgraced former governor, George Ryan, who was convicted on charges he ran state government like a criminal enterprise. … Blagojevich’s 14-year sentence on myriad corruption charges was harsh but deserved. Sending him back to Illinois would be a gut-punch to the law-abiding, frustrated, fed-up electorate here, more than 2 million of whom voted for Trump in 2016 based in part on his ‘drain the swamp’ attitude toward sleaze in government.”

-- Obama, whose seat Blagojevich hoped to get something for, refused to even consider commuting the sentence. But politics can make for strange bedfellows, and there are some in this case. Sen. Dick Durbin, No. 2 in Democratic leadership, has expressed support for a commutation, much to the private chagrin of some members of his caucus. So has former congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., who served time in the slammer for misusing campaign money to finance an extravagant personal life. He wrote a letter to Trump last month with his father and namesake, the onetime Democratic presidential candidate. “Blagojevich was a governor that cared for the people,” the Jacksons wrote. They called the sentence “far longer than the offense deserved.”

-- Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), whose conversations with Blagojevich were picked up by the FBI wiretaps and featured in attack ads before last year’s election, said his predecessor “should remain in prison.” He told a gaggle of reporters at the state fair yesterday that Trump should be focusing on keeping the American people safe from the epidemic of gun violence, not this.