President Trump is open to pardoning businesswoman Martha Stewart and commuting the sentence of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
The president made the revelation to reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday, hours after he announced plans to pardon Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative author and documentary filmmaker who pleaded guilty in 2014 to a federal charge of making illegal campaign donations.
Blagojevich, a Democrat, was convicted in 2011 of attempting to extort a children’s hospital for campaign donations and seeking to sell the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama after he was elected president.
His charges included wire fraud, extortion, and soliciting bribes. Blagojevich is nearly halfway through a 14-year prison sentence at a federal prison in Colorado.
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from the former governor of his convictions.
Lawyers for the former Illinois governor had been hoping Trump would intervene in his case. After the Supreme Court declined Blagojevich’s request to consider his case, his wife, Patricia Blagojevich, appeared on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to appeal to the president.
Trump and Blagojevich know each other from “The Celebrity Apprentice,” as the former governor appeared on season nine of the show in 2010.
The president told reporters aboard Air Force One that Blagojevich’s comments about Obama’s open Senate seat were a “stupid thing to say, but 18 years?”
Len Goodman, Blagojevich’s lawyer, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner the governor’s legal team is updating its request for a commutation from Trump.
“We submitted a request for commutation. President Obama did not act on it. We are now in the process of updating it,” Goodman said. “Of course, President Trump is not bound by formal procedure. He can issue a pardon or a commutation. He has the power to correct an injustice.”
Stewart was found guilty by a Manhattan jury in 2004 of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators about the sale of stock in a biotechnology company.
Former FBI Director James Comey, who Trump fired last year, brought the charges against Stewart while serving as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison.
