If it was a crime to wear a bad toupee, former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich would be sentenced to several life terms in front of a firing squad.
But it’s not.
But it is a crime for a governor to sell an open U.S. Senate seat.
In 2011, Blagojevich, a Democrat, was impeached from office and subsequently sentenced to 14 years in federal prison on corruption charges that were related to his attempt to “sell” the Senate seat that Barack Obama surrendered after he was elected president.
https://www.justice.gov/media/1052326/dl?inline
Prosecutors played a tape of a November 5, 2008, conversation in which Blagojevich said:
“I’ve got this thing and it’s f***ing golden. And I, I’m not giving it up for f***ing nothing.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/blagojevich-defense-coming-off-harsh-criticism-from-judge/
How anyone could interpret what Blagojevich said as criminal is beyond me.
Donald Trump would call this a “perfect phone call.”
Trump was impeached for an August 2019 “perfect” phone call where he pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up damaging information on former Vice President Joe Biden, considered a frontrunner to be the Democratic nominee in the next year’s presidential election.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49800181
In December 2020, after Trump lost the election to Biden, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and pressured him in a “perfect” phone to find enough votes to reverse the winner of the state’s election from Biden to Trump.
This phone call is part of Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis’s investigation that resulted in Trump and 18 others being indicted in a conspiracy to overturn the results of the election in Georgia.
Perfect phone calls do not end in impeachments or criminal indictments.
While awaiting trial, Balgojevich appeared on Celebrity Apprentice but was fired for his mistakes on a promotion for Universal Studio’s new The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/blagojevich-trump-relationship-celebrity-apprentice-checkbook/
President Donald Trump issued a pardon for Blagojevich in February 2020 for the crimes he committed as governor.
The pardon did not include his mistakes he made on Celebrity Apprentice.
“He’s been in jail for seven years, over a phone call where nothing happens . . . over a phone call where, you know, he shouldn’t have said what he said, but it was braggadocio, you would say. I would think that there have been many politicians — I’m not one of them, by the way — that have said a lot worse over telephones,” he added.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-to-commute-sentence-of-ex-gov-blagojevich-pardon-kerik
