Former Democratic Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich, speaking to the press at Denver International Airport Tuesday night after his release from prison, made clear his gratitude to President Trump for commuting his sentence after 8 years, proclaiming himself a “Trumpocrat."
“I want to express most profound and everlasting gratitude to President Trump. He didn’t have to do this. He’s a Republican president, I was a Democratic governor. My fellow Democrats have not been very kind to him, they’ve been - in fact they’ve been very unkind to him. What he did was, I think, something that deserves a great amount of appreciation on my part personally, and he has from me my deepest, most profound gratitude…[He’s} got obviously a big fan in me, and if you’re asking me what my party affiliation is, I’m a Trumpocrat.”
Blagojevich continued, laying some heavy criticism on the criminal justice system, saying, “It’s a broken criminal justice system, and it’s an unfair criminal justice system. It’s a criminal justice system with too many people who have too much power, who don’t have any accountability and they could railroad people, put innocent people in prison, and are, generally speaking, virtually always prone to over-sentence people. It’s a criminal justice system that’s not only broken, but it’s also racist, and I saw how it affects people of color, and how, in cases with non-violent first offender drug offenders, that they’re made to do decades of prison time for things, for mistakes they made, wrongs they committed, that any fair-minded society would not allow.”
Blagojevich was convicted of corruption and sentenced to 14 years in prison. The most well known corruption charge involved trying to sell former President Obama’s old Senate seat.