"I’ve written hundreds of stories, blog posts, magazine articles and, finally, a book on Blagojevich’s case. There was one sentiment I heard over and over again..."

"... which went something like, 'I know Blagojevich was guilty as hell but 14 years is insane.' That’s why President Donald Trump likely risks little political blowback by commuting the sentence of his onetime Apprentice contestant, even in the state that Blagojevich disgraced."

Writes Natasha Korecki in Politico.

And here's Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker, "The Trouble with Donald Trump's Clemencies and Pardons":

Authoritarianism is usually associated with a punitive spirit—a leader who prosecutes and incarcerates his enemies. But there is another side to this leadership style. Authoritarians also dispense largesse, but they do it by their own whims, rather than pursuant to any system or legal rule. The point of authoritarianism is to concentrate power in the ruler, so the world knows that all actions, good and bad, harsh and generous, come from a single source. That’s the real lesson—a story of creeping authoritarianism—of today’s commutations and pardons by President Trump....

[T]he pardons were entirely personal in origin.... A benevolent leader dispensed favors.... In this era of mass incarceration, many people deserve pardons and commutations, but this is not the way to go about it. 

Here's Wikipedia's list of Trump's pardons and commutations. Did Toobin just look at yesterday's announcements? It seems to me that Trump has granted clemency to some ordinary but deserving people caught in our "mass incarceration."

Toobin concludes:

All Trump has done is to prove that he can reward his friends and his friends’ friends. The chilling corollary is that he knows he can punish his enemies, too.

Granting clemency is a normal part of executive power, an explicit provision of the Constitution. Did Toobin indulge in this kind of "chilling corollary" reasoning when Obama was President?

By the way, why didn't Obama commute Blagojevich's sentence?

Amy Klobuchar gets a second chance to say the name of the president of Mexico, and she still can't say "Andrés Manuel López Obrador."

She pronounces "Andrés" as "Andre" — no "s" and the accent on the first syllable:



It's like Ron Blagojevich trying to prove to Donald Trump that he can name the houses in Harry Potter's Hogwarts School:



He says "It's Slithering and it's Hufflepuff and it's Ravencloth." But it's Slitherin and Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw.

Blagojevich only needed to impress Trump. (He failed.) There were no Hogwarts voters to feel alienated by his inability to pronounce Hogwarts names.

Klobuchar needs to impress Hispanic voters, and saying "Andre" for "Andrés" feels as though you have no experience with people who speak Spanish.  Or even just the Spanish language, with its super-simple pronunciation rules. The way she grins while saying it wrong is so disturbing.

ADDED: If you keep watching the Klobuchar clip — which I finally did — you'll see she proceeds from her proud pronunciation of the name to blathering about why she got it wrong, and it's the worst possible answer! She says she'd had a very long busy day, and she was tired. She lists events "ending about 2 or 3 in the morning."

3 in the morning! That's the precise time that we've been saying a President needs to be ready to go, completely up for the most challenging tasks!

"Former Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, himself impeached and now serving a 14-year term in federal prison for corruption, said in a new op-ed that today's House Democrats would have impeached Abraham Lincoln."

Fox News reports.

"Lincoln didn't ask Congress for permission when he declared an end to nearly 250 years of slavery and offered freedom to millions of slaves in the American South," he said, referring to the Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on this day in 1863 and itself was a "unilateral" executive branch decision.

In addition, the 62-year-old former governor said Pelosi would likely charge that Lincoln had committed "Confederate Collusion" when he offered Virginia native Gen. Robert E. Lee command of the U.S. Army....

"Can't you see how a Speaker Pelosi and many of today's House Democrats would call for the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate Lincoln for 'Confederate Collusion' and bring impeachment charges for abuse of power for offering the top military command to a guy who would go on to become the top military commander of the other side?" he asked in his column.

Trump pardons Dinesh D'Souza.

Will be giving a Full Pardon to Dinesh D’Souza today. He was treated very unfairly by our government!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2018

AND: From WaPo:

The president, who has issued a series of pardons in recent months, said he is also considering leniency in number of other cases, including those of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich (D) and Martha Stewart, the author and television personality....

Trump later told reporters traveling with him on Air Force One that he is considering commuting the remainder of the sentence of Blagojevich, who was convicted in 2010 on charges relating to the selling of President Barack Obama’s former Senate seat.

[Blagojevich's b]ragging about getting something in return for a Senate appointment, Trump said, was “a stupid thing to say—but 18 years?”

"Everyone seems to be mourning your exit from office... I'm glad you're gone. I'm not delusional — you're not a saint."

"You were a mediocre president with unoriginal ideas.... I thought you would finally right this wrong..."

This wrong = the conviction of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich.

"You didn't have to pardon him, only commute the sentence. You just had to let him come home. You didn't. You released others, like Chelsea Manning or FALN terrorists, who actually committed reprehensible crimes, but you failed to release an innocent man.... I am shocked at how bitter and full of hate I have become.... I truly thought you were a good person. I guess I was just as brainwashed as everyone else. At least now I can see the blood on your hands."

Wrote Rod Blagojevich's 20-year-old daughter, Amy Blagojevich.

Adding tags to this post, I see I have an old tag Blagosmear on Obama. That goes back to a time when I pictured Blagojevich dragging Obama down. That didn't happen, and I think Obama figured out how to keep Blagojevichishness off of him.

Here's my original "Blagosmear on Obama" post, from December 14, 2008, before Obama even took office. The GOP had put out this video, obviously intended to wreck Obama before he got started:



I'm not surprised Obama never did anything to help Rod Blagojevich. I feel sorry for the man's daughter, but look how her father undercut Obama on the eve of his honeymoon.

IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said:

Blagojevich's sentence was ridiculously long. Trump should commute to 6.5 years, which is what George Ryan's sentence was. The judge is an asshole who was pissed that Blagojevich got a hung jury on the first trial.

A few comments later, mccullough came back and said:

Trump fired Blagojevich on Celebrity Apprentice. It would be awkward for him to get involved now. So he'll probably get involved.

Ha ha. That made me go look up the old "Apprentice" scene:



Trump does fire him, but he also expresses respect for his tenacity and shakes his hand and wishes him well.

More "Apprentice" with Blagojevich (and Joan Rivers too):



"I'll do anything [PAUSE] legal and ethical and [PAUSE] honest."

"The Supreme Court Case That Could Clobber Public-Sector Unions."

Garrett Epps looks at yesterday's oral argument.

[The National Right to Work Committee argues] that permitting the [public-sector] unions to collect fees for representing non-members—the so-called “agency fee”—violates the First Amendment....

Since public employees work for government, everything they bargain about is political. Higher wages, better benefits, new work rules—all affect the state budget. Assessing fees from non-members thus requires them to pay for political speech.

All the expenses, in other words, are non-chargeable.

Scalia appeared skeptical of that argument, but it went over with three of the other four conservatives.

So liberal hopes hang on Scalia of all people. Epps extracts some quotes.

30 lawyers each pick a book that every lawyer should read, and Dr. Kevorkian's lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, picks...

... "The Little Prince"!

“The Little Prince connects you with your own being so you’re looking inward rather than outward. When you really get down to trial work there isn’t a mechanism where you learn tricks for convincing people of something you really don’t believe. It all has to come from inside you and requires self-examination. I don’t think it has relevance for lawyers doing transactions or mergers and acquisitions. It does have relevance for those who seek to do what I do, which is trial law.”

A somewhat similar perspective comes from Sam Adam Jr. (who represented Governor Blagojevich at trial):

“Respect For Acting [by Uta Hagen] taught me how to look inside yourself and bring out those things that other people see, or want to see, to take a look at a character and understand who that character is in order to become that person. That’s what a whole lot of trials are about—preconceived notions about who you are, and who your client is. You can quickly sum up who the audience wants you to be.”

There are a lot of different ways to look inside yourself. Interesting to think about the lawyerly ways.

Blagojevich gets 14 years.

Even though he's saying he's "unbelievably sorry."

"There is a line between routine politics, horse trading and campaign politics... I thought they were permissible and I was mistaken."

He's sorry he misunderstood where the line was. Unbelievably sorry.

Blagojevich convicted on 17 charges of corruption.

"Body Search."

A  portrait of Blago.

Blagojevich juror: "It was like, ‘Here’s a manual, go fly the space shuttle."

The work was too complicated!

Jurors said it took them several days just to figure out how to begin to break down their assignment into manageable tasks — not to mention how to understand the legal terminology (what exactly is conspiracy to commit extortion?). These were early hints of the multiple stumbling blocks they would find as they struggled, but failed, over 14 days of deliberations, to reach a verdict on any of the counts but one.

It also became clear early on that some jurors believed that much of Mr. Blagojevich’s crass political talk — captured in hours of secretly recorded phone calls — amounted to dreamy thoughts of what he might gain, not criminal demands.

You know, when someone is blabbing a lot dreamy thoughts, it might add up to a whole bunch of nothing. Wait. I got distracted. We're still talking about Blagojevich, right?

“A lot of it came down to, ‘What was his intent?’ ” [Steve] Wlodek said. “You could infer something if you looked at it one way, or not if you looked another.”

That's reasonable doubt. Didn't you at least get the memo that when there's reasonable doubt, you're supposed to find the defendant not guilty?

After initial frustration and confusion upon arriving in the deliberation room with little sense of what to do next, the jurors laid out a plan.

On large sheets of paper, they wrote down crimes Mr. Blagojevich was accused of committing, and taped each one on the walls around the room. On the sheets: a claim that he had sought political contributions in exchange for legislation to help a local pediatric hospital; another that he had sought a political fund-raising event in exchange for state financing for a school; another that he had sought payments for a law that would benefit the horse racing industry; and so on.

Good for them.  There must have a been a temptation to look at the whole big tangle and make an intuitive guess that he's a crook, then try to see where the actual crimes are.  Ah, but that's sort of what they did. Read the linked article. The votes kept splitting over all the crimes except the charge Blagojevich tried to sell the Senate seat. On that one, there was a lone holdout. None of the jurors will reveal who this person was, except to say that she was one of the women.

Mr. Wlodek described her stance as “very noble,” adding: “She did not see it as a violation of any laws. It was politics. It was more of conversations of what-ifs.”

If it were a play, she'd gradually win the rest of them over.

The linked NYT article seems to be written around the theme that if only the prosecutor had simplified the case and concentrated on the charge of selling the Senate seat, Blagojevich would have been convicted on a corruption charge. If that's the case, then, on retrial, the prosecutors know what to do. Won't they win?

Consider what the defense has learned. Even though only one juror held out, she held out for a long time, under great pressure. The other jurors clearly respect her. She was "very noble." On retrial, the defense will, I presume, try to make all the jurors feel the doubt she did. Was it not reasonable doubt?

"[A] female juror ... was the lone holdout on convicting Blagojevich of attempting to sell the Senate seat 'wanted clear-cut evidence, and not everything was clear-cut.'"

According to one juror.

"The president-elect would be very pleased if you appointed Valerie and he would be, uh, thankful and appreciative."

"They're not willing to give me anything but appreciation -- f--- them." Blagojevich. The trial continues.

After Barack Obama friend Valerie Jarrett publicly pulled out of contention for the U.S. Senate seat appointment, Rahm Emanuel... wanted Blagojevich to know the list of Senate candidates "acceptable" to Obama, according to testimony Thursday in Blagojevich's corruption trial.

They were: Tammy Duckworth; Illinois state comptroller Dan Hynes; U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, according to Blagojevich's former chief of staff John Harris.

Harris told the ex-governor of the discussion in a secretly recorded phone call Nov. 12.

On the call, Blagojevich calls the list "B.S."

Harris testified the former governor believed Obama's list to be political cover.

"If that became public, the president-elect would want the list to represent a diverse group of individuals," Harris explained from the stand.

Sestak/Romanoff/Blagojevich...

Things going on at the same time. 

[A] second Democrat has come forward to confirm that the Obama administration dangled high-ranking government jobs in an attempt to move him out of a challenge to a Democratic incumbent senator.

Andrew Romanoff, a former state legislator in Colorado, said Wednesday evening that deputy White House chief of staff Jim Messina said three separate government jobs “might be available to me were I not pursuing the Senate race.”

Also Thursday, the corruption trial of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich will begin in Chicago. The proceedings will last several months and have begun to gain notice in the press because of the potential for embarrassing information about the president or some of his top advisers – chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, top advisers David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett and others – to emerge....

Romanoff made his admission largely because pressure on him to confirm or deny reports from last fall was renewed after the White House was forced last Friday to detail what they offered to Rep. Joe Sestak, Pennsylvania Democrat, to get him out of his Senate primary challenge to Sen. Arlen Specter.

Thwarted by a federal judge in his effort to go on "I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here," Rod Blagojevich is going to be on...

... "Celebrity Apprentice."

"What does it cost to get an unqualified student into the University of Illinois law school? "

"Five jobs for graduating law students, suggest internal e-mails released Thursday.... When Law School Dean Heidi Hurd balked on accepting the applicant in April 2006, [University of Illinois Chancellor Richard] Herman replied that the request came "Straight from the G. My apologies. Larry has promised to work on jobs (5). What counts?" Hurd replied: 'Only very high-paying jobs in law firms that are absolutely indifferent to whether the five have passed their law school classes or the Bar.' Hurd's e-mail suggests that students getting the jobs are to be those in the 'bottom of the class.' Law school rankings depend in part on the job placement rate of graduates."

The G = (apparently) Blagojevich.

Devastating.

(Via TaxProf.)

"Black care never catches a rider whose pace is fast enough. You got that?"

Said wacky old Rod Blagojevich, who pleaded not guilty today.

***

Can someone tell me how they got that photograph at the link to look so surreal?

"If I've done the things I've been accused of, I would be too embarrassed to stand up here because you are all my friends."

The pressure on Burris to resign.

Can we say Roland Burris lied to get to his Senate seat?

Here's what we know so far. I see no reason to be delicate about it. I have defended Burris — click the tag to see — and I say that if he was not forthcoming about how he got the seat Blagojevich handed him, he does not deserve to keep it. Expel him, Senate!

"He doesn't seem like a total douche."

Why the crazy love for Blago?