Prez Trump pardons former Illinois Gov after prior commutation … are more clemencies in the works?

As reported in this AP piece, “President Donald Trump on Monday pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, whose 14-year sentence for political corruption charges he commuted during his first term.”  Here is more:

The Republican president called the Democratic former governor, who once appeared on Trump’s reality TV show “Celebrity Apprentice,” “a very fine person” and said the conviction and prison sentence “shouldn’t have happened.”

“I’ve watched him. He was set up by a lot of bad people, some of the same people I had to deal with,” Trump said at the White House as he signed the pardon.

Blagojevich was convicted in 2011 on charges that included seeking to sell an appointment to then-President Barack Obama’s old Senate seat and trying to shake down a children’s hospital. Blagojevich served eight years in prison before Trump cut short his term in 2020….

At the time that Trump announced Blagojevich’s commutation in 2020, Trump had been investigated for his ties to Russia and their attempts to interfere in the 2016 election. The president made clear that he saw similarities between efforts to investigate his own conduct and those that took down Blagojevich.

I have been wondering ever since Prez Trump’s flurry of clemency action his first week back in the oval office (see posts here and here and here and here) if he was going to put away his clemency pen for months or even years to come.  Notably, it has been roughly a half-century since any president has granted a significant number of clemencies during his first few months in office.  But this Blagojevich pardon suggests Prez Trump may be inclined to make clemency a regular (if not quite regularized) part of his second term.

Of course, there is no shortage of federal criminal defendants hoping that Prez Trump will keep his clemency pen active.  Here are just some of the press pieces I have noticed in recent weeks about various folks eager to encourage Prez Trump to see more folks as worthy of his clemency attention:

From The Daily Beast, “Sam Bankman-Fried’s Parents Seeking Trump Crypto Pardon for Son“

From The Economic Times, “Joe Exotic begs Donald Trump for pardon, says Justice department ‘weaponised against me’“

From The Hill, “Democrats accused of corruption look to Trump for clemency“

From the New York Post, “Disgraced ‘Chrisley Knows Best’ fraudster couple to seek Trump pardon”