Shorouk Express
President Donald Trump is planning on pardoning former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, according to Axios.
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.
“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 was set to sign a pardon on Monday afternoon, according to a person familiar with the plans speaking on condition of anonymity to the Associated Press.
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.
