Trump gives full pardon to former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich

Both Trump and Blagojevich have drawn comparisons between their respective legal woes

President Donald Trump has issued a full pardon to former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

The ex-governor served eight years behind bars for an array of corruption charges, including trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat following the former president’s 2008 election victory. In 2020, Trump commuted Blagojevich’s 14-year sentence.

Following his impeachment and removal from office, Blagojevich appeared on Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice NBC show in 2010, before the beginning of the corruption trial against him. When Trump “fired” him as a contestant, he took the opportunity to praise Blagojevich.

The former governor and Democrat, who was in office between 2003 and 2009, backed Trump in the 2024 election and attended the Republican National Convention. Blagojevich also supported Trump after he was indicted in the New York hush-money case, comparing his own legal problems to Trump’s.

Rod Blagojevich had his sentence commuted by Trump in 2020. He has now received a full pardon from the president (AP)

“I love Trump more today than ever!” he wrote on social media at the time. “When you’ve lived through it yourself, you recognize when they do it to someone else,” he added.

Trump signed the pardon on Monday afternoon, according to the Associated Press.

“I’ve watched him. He was set up by a lot of bad people, some of the same people I had to deal with,” Trump said of Blagojevich at the White House as he signed the pardon.

At the time that Trump announced Blagojevich’s commutation in 2020, Trump himself had been investigated for his ties to Russia and their attempts to interfere in the 2016 election. The president made clear that he saw similarities between efforts to investigate his own conduct and those that took down Blagojevich.

“It was a prosecution by the same people — Comey, Fitzpatrick, the same group,” Trump told reporters on Monday, referring to Patrick Fitzgerald, the former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Blagojevich and later represented former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired from the agency in May 2017.

Comey was working in the private sector during the Blagojevich investigation and indictment.

Blagojevich speaks to the media outside his home in Chicago as his wife, Patti, wipes away tears a day before reporting to prison after his conviction on corruption charges (AP)

In addition to being convicted of trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat, Blagojevich was also charged with attempting to extort a children’s hospital in Chicago for campaign donations. While Blagojevich was convicted on 18 counts in 2011 — and sentenced to 14 years in prison — Chicago’s seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out five of the convictions, including counts for offering to appoint someone to a lucrative Senate job.

“I’m not asking President Trump for anything. I’m profoundly grateful to him for commuting my 14 year prison sentence and giving my daughter’s their father back,” Blagojevich wrote recently on X.

“What I am seeking is justice and for the truth of the corrupt prosecution against me to be exposed. If we are going to save our democracy, lawfare and the weaponization of prosecutors for political purposes must end and those who engage in it must be brought to account.”

The expected pardon comes weeks after Trump granted clemency on his first day back in the White House to more than 1,500 people charged with crimes in connection to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Rioters found guilty of violent acts against police officers were released, as were leaders of far-right extremist groups plotting to keep Trump in power despite his 2020 election loss to former President Joe Biden.