Rod Blagojevich is still talking like a candidate. In Chicago in October, just over two weeks before his memoir is set to publish, the former Illinois governor said he still thinks about getting back into politics and would like to change his obituary.
He made the pitch while sitting with his wife of 36 years, Patti, at the Warbler on Chicago’s North Side, talking through a past that has kept him in the public eye for nearly two decades. Blagojevich said he has “nothing to hide,” and pointed to his own background as a Golden Gloves boxer in the 1970s, saying politics appealed to him because it was like sports, a place where you could compete.
That is the version of Blagojevich he is trying to put back on the table as he promotes Framed, F*cked, and Freed. The book arrives after years in which his name has been shorthand for corruption in Illinois, and he is making clear he wants readers to see something else now: a man who says he was framed, survived prison and still believes he belongs in elected office.
The record he is trying to outrun is a hard one. In November 2008, he was caught on an FBI wiretap seeming to make plans to profit from Barack Obama’s recently vacated Senate seat, including the boast that he had something “fucking golden” and was not giving it up for “fucking nothing.” Jurors later convicted him on 17 criminal counts of corruption in 2011. He says he was framed and that gaming out possible trade chips was legal, but the conviction remains the fact that defined the case.
Blagojevich also says Michael Madigan rushed to impeach him. One of the convictions tied to the Senate-seat scheme was later overturned in 2015, while another charge, involving campaign contributions in exchange for approving funding for a children’s hospital, was upheld. Then came February 2020, when Donald Trump freed him after almost eight years of his sentence. Blagojevich had already turned up on The Celebrity Apprentice while out on bail, later embracing the line, “You get me out of jail, you get my vote,” and calling himself a “Trump-o-crat.”
Now he has a lobbying firm of his own, and one of its clients is Milorad Dodik. That work keeps him inside politics even as he says he wants back into it, a life built around influence while he tries to recast himself as someone fit to hold office again. He has also said he became an avid Bible reader in prison and tries to let forgiveness guide his behavior, a softer note that sits uneasily beside the wiretaps and the convictions.
The real question is not whether Blagojevich still talks about politics. He clearly does. It is whether a man who was convicted on 17 corruption counts, pardoned by Trump and now sells a memoir about being wronged can turn that story into a credible path back to elected office.
