For the second time this year all eyes are on the White House to see if there is a holiday gift which could mean freedom for former governor Rod Blagojevich.
Blagojevich is roughly halfway through a 14-year corruption sentence at the federal prison in suburban Denver. Over the weekend, President Donald Trump dispatched a tweet that seemed to equate his case with Blagojevich’s own legal troubles.
But whether that means a Christmas commutation is in the works, isn’t clear.
The latest drama began Friday night, when Patti Blagojevich made an appearance on Fox News Channel, equating her husband’s case to special counsel Robert Mueller’s most recent probes into fundraising for the Trump inaugural.
"These prosecutors with their unchecked power and no oversight can go after any politician they want," the former Illinois First Lady said on Fox. "They were successful in going after my husband and locking him up and throwing away the key, and because nobody stopped them from going after my husband, now they are going after a bigger target!"
That prompted a tweet from the president declaring, "Required television watching in last week’s @marthamaccallum interview with the wonderful wife of Rod Blagojevich and the @trish_regan interview with Jerome Corsi. If that doesn’t tell you something about what has been going on in our country, nothing will. Very sad!"
Corsi, a well-known conspiracy theorist tied to previous questions about President Obama’s birth certificate and hoaxes about government involvement in 9/11, reportedly is under scrutiny by the special counsel as part of the Wikileaks release of Clinton emails.
Last May, the president suggested in another tweet that Blagojevich was doing time for "being stupid and saying things that every other politician, you know, that many other politicians say." Many observers believed a commutation of the former governor’s prison sentence might happen, but no action was taken.
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Blagojevich was a contestant on President Trump’s "Celebrity Apprentice" program. The former First Lady has made a series of appearances on Fox, the president’s network of choice, to press her husband’s case.
