President Trump said Thursday that he was considering commuting the sentence of disgraced former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and pardoning style maven Martha Stewart.
Trump said he was thinking of commuting Blagojevich’s 14-year prison sentence because the “stupid” and “foolish” comments he made shouldn’t have put him behind bars.
“Because what he did does not justify 18 years in a jail. If you read his statement, it was a foolish statement, there was a lot of bravado,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One on a flight to Texas. “Plenty of other politicians have said a lot worse. And it doesn’t, he shouldn’t have been put in jail.”
In 2010, Trump fired Blagojevich when he appeared on his “Celebrity Apprentice” show on NBC.
Trump said that both Blagojevich, who he pointed out was a Democrat, and Stewart were “unfairly treated.”
“I think to a certain extent Martha Stewart was harshly and unfairly treated. And she used to be my biggest fan in the world … before I became a politician,” he said. “But that’s OK, I don’t view it that way.”
Stewart was found guilty in 2004 of conspiracy and of making false statements to federal investigators during an insider trading investigation into her sale of ImClone stock just before it plunged in value.
She spent five months in a federal prison in West Virginia.
Blagojevich was convicted in 2011 on public corruption charges for trying to sell a state Senate seat once held by Barack Obama.
He is about halfway through his 14-year prison sentence.
In a commentary piece published Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal, Blagojevich claimed he was the victim of the country’s out-of-control law enforcement agencies.
“The rule of law is under assault in America. It is being perverted and abused by the people sworn to enforce and uphold it,” he wrote in the newspaper. “Some in the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation are abusing their power to criminalize the routine practices of politics and government.”
Trump has been railing about special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, saying the FBI used an informant to spy on his campaign during the 2016 election.
He has demanded an investigation into whether the Obama-era FBI placed the informant for “political purposes.”
Also on Thursday, Trump granted a full pardon to conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, who was convicted of making illegal contributions in a Senate race in New York.
“Will be giving a Full Pardon to Dinesh D’Souza today. He was treated very unfairly by our government!,” the president wrote in the Twitter posting.