The Great America Sunday Show: February 23, 2025
The Great America Show
Fawcett Strategies
4.7 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Over 17-years ago, then Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was indicted and charged with 'crimes' related to the filling Obama's seat in the Senate. Two years later, he was found guilty of one count of making false statements and a mistrial declared on 23 charges due to a hung jury after 14 days of jury deliberation.
Prosecutors, within 15-minutes, announced they would seek a retrial and so they did. At the retrial, he found guilty of 11 charges of corruption related to the sale of the Obama seat and 6 charges related to pay-to-play dealings. On Dec 7th 2011, Rod was sentenced to 14-years in jail, which he served 8 out of those 14 years with President Trump commuting his sentence in 2020. Since that time, Trump has also issued a full pardon to Rod. So what was the reasoning behind going after him in the first place? Why did Obama want him gone? Rod never received a dollar from the alleged scheme and at trial, the judge would not allow the wiretapping tapes to be played. If he was wiretapped, and did the crime, why not release the tapes for a jury to decide, what did they have to hide?
Guest: Governor Rod Blagojevich
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everybody and welcome to the Great America Show. It's great to have you with us. Thanks so much for joining us. Happy Wednesday. |
| 0:09.7 | Folks, today's show is going to be a little bit different. In just a few moments, I'm going to be joined by the former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich. You may have heard his name in the news over the last few weeks, over the last few years, over the last 10 plus years. |
| 0:24.6 | He's the former governor of Illinois, a man who was brought down by none other than Barack Obama. |
| 0:32.0 | On August 17th of 2010, he was convicted on one of 24 federal charges, a charge of lying to the FBI, |
| 0:40.3 | and the jury was hung on 23 other counts. Now, these 23 other counts all stemmed from |
| 0:45.9 | what they alleged was bribery of him trying to sell Barack Hussein Obama's Senate seat |
| 0:50.8 | once Barack went to the White House. Now, his defense didn't call a single witness |
| 0:56.3 | claiming the prosecutors had to prove their case. They had to prove that he was guilty of what |
| 1:01.5 | they accused him of. Within 15 minutes of the mistrial on those 23 other counts, the prosecution's |
| 1:08.4 | team announced they would definitely pursue a retrial on 23 mistrial |
| 1:12.8 | counts. Post-verdict court date was set for August 23rd of 2010. Federal prosecutors reduced |
| 1:19.1 | the number of counts on Bogoyevich's retrial and on June 27th of 2011, he was found guilty |
| 1:25.1 | on 17 of the remaining 20 charges and not guilty on one. |
| 1:30.0 | No verdict was rendered by the jury on two counts. |
| 1:33.2 | He was found guilty on all charges pertaining to the Senate seat as well as what they called extortion |
| 1:38.2 | relating to state funds being directed towards a children's hospital and a racetrack. |
| 1:42.8 | Now, sort of interesting, right? You may say, |
| 1:45.3 | oh, okay, well, this man did some bad things. But it gets a little bit more interesting than that. |
| 1:52.1 | The prosecutors had claimed that they had hours and hours of wiretaps. They wiretapped him. |
| 1:59.2 | They wired tapped his phone and monitored him for a very long time. |
| 2:03.3 | So they had hours and hours of wiretap. The interesting part was they only released a few minutes of it for the jury to follow along. |
| 2:12.8 | So this is a man now who's facing corruption charges, will ruin his life. |
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