« Effective looks at an effective look at the reality of community supervision | Main | "Trump grants clemency to 11, including former junk bond king Michael Milken" »

February 18, 2020

Prez Trump pardons former 49ers owner amidst talk of clemency for former Illinois Gov and former NYPD commissioner

Prez Trump has his clemency pen out again, and a number of notable names are involved as per this breaking NBC News piece headlined "Trump expected to grant clemency to former Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich, ex-NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik." Here is what is being reported just before 2pm:

President Donald Trump is expected to grant clemency to former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was impeached and removed from office in 2009 on corruption charges, and to former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik, two people familiar with the president's plans said Tuesday.

The news comes hours after Trump signed an executive order granting a full pardon to former San Francisco 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. related to a decades-old corruption charge.

Blagojevich, 63, was sentenced in 2011 to 14 years in federal prison on corruption charges related to his solicitation of bribes in an attempt to "sell" the Senate seat Barack Obama left open after being elected president. Blagojevich, a Democrat, has been serving his term at the low-security Federal Correctional Institute in Englewood, Colorado.  He was a contestant on Trump’s reality TV show "The Celebrity Apprentice" in 2010.

Kerik was sentenced in 2010 to four years in prison after pleading guilty to eight felony charges, including tax fraud.

The president said in August of last year that he was "very strongly" considering giving Blagojevich a reprieve — not the first he'd publicly floated the idea. "I'm thinking about commuting his sentence very strongly," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One then. "I think it’s enough — seven years," he added, referring the amount of time the ex-governor has already served....

In 2018, in the weeks after he pardoned conservative provocateur Dinesh D'Souza, Trump had said he’d been “thinking about” taking the action on behalf of the ex-governor. Trump told reporters in May 2018 that Blagojevich had received a lengthy sentence "for being stupid and saying things that every other politician, you know, that many other politicians say” and “that he was treated unfairly.” The remarks were likely a reference to what the then-governor was picked up saying on secret federal wiretaps about his authority to appoint someone to Obama's open Senate seat.

Blagojevich has argued he was a victim of federal prosecutors run amok — a claim Trump himself levied at former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election and the president. “Under the legal arguments that prosecutors used to convict me, all fundraising can be viewed as bribery," the ex-governor wrote in a 2018 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that was widely viewed as a personal appeal to Trump for clemency.

Democrats — including Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and former Attorney General Eric Holder — have said publicly in the past that they’d support efforts by Trump to commute Blagojevich's sentence.

Notably, I blogged a few days ago about  of this recent USA Today commentary authored by Professor Nora Demleitner which noted that most people given clemency by Prez Trump are not disadvantaged people of color convicted of drug crimes like Alice Marie Johnson, but rather are white men of privilege convicted of crimes of power.  Blagojevich, DeBartolo and Kerik all fit that latter description.

A few (of many) prior related posts:

UPDATE: Here are new headlines seemingly confirming that two different forms of clemency have been granted to Blagojevich and Kerik:

February 18, 2020 at 01:53 PM | Permalink

Comments

Post a comment

In the body of your email, please indicate if you are a professor, student, prosecutor, defense attorney, etc. so I can gain a sense of who is reading my blog. Thank you, DAB