From the runway of the Andrews air base, just outside of Washington, before flying to Los Angeles to attend an election campaign fundraiser, Donald Trump made a surprising announcement on Tuesday. The president of the United States has communicated to the press his intention to shorten the sentence of Rod Blagojevich, 63, sentenced in 2011 to 14 years in prison for 17 charges, including trying to sell to the highest bidder the Senate seat that Barack Obama set free when he won the presidency in 2008. With the presidential pardon to Blagojevich, Trump frees him from serving the rest of the sentence, although the verdict that convicted him remains.
Blagojevich, a Democrat, was elected governor twice, and arrived in Springfield (capital of Illinois) with the promise of cleaning up the corruption that had eroded the state's political system for decades. However, Blago , as he was known, went deeper into this corruption by extorting, for example, managers from a children's hospital or executives from the horse racing business to get campaign contributions in exchange for political favors.
"Yes, we have commuted Rod Blagojevich's sentence," Trump said at Andrews base. "He has spent eight years in jail, a long time," the president said. "He seems like a very nice person, although I don't know him," the president continued without remembering that Blagojevich appeared briefly on the television show of tycoon Celebrity Apprentice .
Trump contributed as an argument to his release four years before the sentence was given the fact that the ex-governor's daughters had never seen him outside the prison and that he took them into consideration when making his decision. "Now he can return home with his family after serving eight years in jail, which in my opinion was a huge and ridiculous sentence," said the president.
Trump has stressed the familiar angle when commuting the sentence by stating that he had seen Blagojevich's wife request clemency on television for her husband, something Patti Blagojevich has been doing mostly in Fox, where he has maintained an active campaign for your release
According to Trump, the former governor was only doing "what politicians do." "I would think that many politicians, and I am not one of them, have said much worse things on the phone anyway," he said.
The victory of Obama in 2008 provided the opportunity for Blagojevich to appoint a substitute for the place of the then new president in the federal Senate. It was when a whole network of corrupts and bribes was discovered. Until Blagojevich came to power, three of Illinois' last eight governors had been jailed for crimes committed during their terms. The last of them had been Republican George Ryan, predecessor of Blago , for granting driver's licenses in exchange for money.
Another dozen people have obtained the presidential pardon, according to the EFE Agency. Among them, Bernard Kerik, who was commissioned by the New York Police, was pardoned after being convicted in 2009 on eight counts of tax evasion and false testimony, for which he served 48 months in a federal jail. The investment bank member Michael Milken, who spent two years in prison after being convicted of fraud in 1989, and former San Francisco 49'ers owner Edward DeBartolo, who in 1998 was also graced with the presidential waiver convicted of extortion in relation to the gaming license for one of his businesses in the State of Louisiana.