Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich on Tuesday walked out of prison after US President Donald Trump cut short his 14-year prison sentence for political corruption.
The Republican president said the punishment imposed on the Chicago Democrat and one-time contestant on Trump’s reality TV show Celebrity Apprentice was excessive.
“So he’ll be able to go back home with his family,” Trump told reporters in Washington. “That was a tremendously powerful, ridiculous sentence in my opinion and in the opinion of many others.”
Photo: EPA-EFE
The Chicago Tribune on Tuesday night posted a photo of the silver-haired Blagojevich at Denver International Airport, where he later boarded a plane for Chicago.
Blagojevich was famously fastidious about his dark hair as governor, but it has gone all white because hair dyes are banned in prison.
He told WGN-TV he appreciated the president’s action.
“I’m profoundly grateful to President Trump, and it’s a profound and everlasting gratitude,” Blagojevich said. “He didn’t have to do this; he’s a Republican president and I was a Democratic governor. I’ll have a lot more to say tomorrow.”
Blagojevich would not say what plans he had for the future, but he did talk a bit about his time in prison.
“I’ve learned a lot about the criminal justice system, how unfair it can be, how unjust it is to people of color,” he said. “I’ve drawn closer to God. There is divine intervention in all of this.”
Blagojevich said that he heard about his commutation when other inmates told him they saw it on the news, adding that he “had no inkling it was coming.”
He told ABC-TV Chicago that his future plans are to “turn evil into good.”
“I’m going to fight against the corrupt criminal justice system that all too often persecutes and prosecutes people who did nothing wrong, who oversentences people, show no mercy and who are in positions who have no accountability,” Blagojevich said. “They can do whatever they want. They can put you into prison for things that aren’t crimes.”
Blagojevich, 63, hails from a state with a long history of pay-to-play schemes. He was convicted in 2011 of crimes that included seeking to sell an appointment to former US president Barack Obama’s old Senate seat and trying to shake down a children’s hospital.
Trump had said repeatedly in recent years that he was considering taking executive action in Blagojevich’s case, only to back away from the idea.
One of Blagojevich’s lawyers said she refused to believe it at first when word of her client’s possible release began to spread, fearing that the president might not follow through.
“When it became obvious it was real, I got tears in my eyes,” Lauren Kaesberg said. “It was overwhelming.”
Others in Illinois, including the governor, said setting Blagojevich free was a mistake.
Trump “has abused his pardon power in inexplicable ways to reward his friends and condone corruption, and I deeply believe this pardon sends the wrong message at the wrong time,” Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker said in a written statement.
Many Republicans agreed.
“In a state where corrupt, machine-style politics is still all too common, it’s important that those found guilty serve their prison sentence in its entirety,” Illinois Republican Party chairman Tim Schneider said.
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