By Ben Bradley | WGN News
In a scathing and stinging decision – that was as much poetry as it was mockery – a federal judge denied former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s effort to overturn his ineligibility to hold office.
“More than a decade ago, Governor Rod Blagojevich left the Dirksen Federal Building in disgrace,” Judge Steve Seeger wrote about Blagojevich’s 2009 public corruption conviction. “At that point, Blagojevich’s career came to a close. The music stopped, the curtain fell, and he exited stage left. He’s back;” Judge Seeger declared in the first paragraphs of his ten-page decision.
More than a decade after he was convicted – and after spending eight years in prison – Blagojevich went back to the courthouse where he was convicted to claim the Illinois legislature was wrong to ban him from running for office in the future. The ban was a result of his impeachment. However, the judge’s new order said the judiciary has “no power to unimpeach, unconvict and unremove a public official.”
Former President Donald Trump commuted Blagojevich’s prison sentence and he was released in 2019. Since then, Illinois’ disgraced democratic governor has sold videos on Cameo and professed a kinship with Trump claiming they were both victims of a “witch hunt.”
The judge seemed to make fun of the former governor’s efforts to remain in the public spotlight.
“Blagojevich didn’t have a graceful exit from public life. It was disgraceful,” Seeger wrote. “And by the looks of things, it wasn’t even an exit. Because Blagojevich wants back in the game, and back on center stage, microphone in hand.”
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