Rod Blagojevich
speaker
701 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 26 Mar
Rod Blagojevich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah.
Yeah. I think that was a lot of it. And, you know, not everybody likes you, and some people really dislike you, and there were guys in prison who really didn't like me. But for the most part, I had a lot of, you know, I had low approval ratings after I got arrested, as they were investigating me when I was governor, but I had pretty high approval ratings in prison with my fellow inmates. Yeah.
And then the lights go down. Then the lights are out. Now suddenly you're swallowed up in blackness and darkness. And we're locked in. I earn bars. You can't get out. And here I am with all these prisoners and inmates, you know, and I just left my family at 5.30 in the morning. I'm not going home tonight or tomorrow night or next week or next month or next year, right?
God willing, I win my appeal, but that might be three years. But even that I was fearful after seeing the criminal justice system and how rigged it was. Deep down, I knew I was a dead man. I knew that from the beginning when they did what they did. I just felt like I had to fight.
I could have pled guilty and got less of a sentence. There's no doubt about that.
No, no, no. I don't think that was- They were still coming for you. No. And they wanted me to snitch on Obama. And they arrested me at six in the morning. I read about that, too, in my house. SWAT teams, 24-member SWAT team around my house. I'm the sitting governor of the fifth-largest state in America. I've got a security detail of my own.
But if four hours later I'm in there while I'm in their custody, it's good cop time and they're not being nice to me. You know, you're not a bad guy. We hear all these tapes. You're just a product of Chicago politics. We think you can help us. We'd like you to talk about Obama. We know he wanted to make a deal with you. Stuff like that. They're telling me. It was clear what they wanted to do.
And I said, look, I didn't do anything wrong. And as far as I know, he didn't either. There's really nothing to talk about. And then their mood changed. And they sent me to another facility. And they put me in this little cell. And they had me next to this angry guy that was all fucked up on PCP or something. He was like a raging wild animal to send me a message.
And I think they were never going to go after Obama. But what they wanted to do was they wanted to go to him and say, I was willing to cooperate against Obama and then leverage that and have Obama then tell him, look, just leave us alone. Let us get this guy. Keep us in office when you get sworn in on January 20th. Don't bring in new U.S. attorneys. Don't bring Democratic U.S. attorneys in.
Keep us Bush U.S. attorneys here. And you stay out of this and we'll leave you alone.
Yes.
Correct. They're political power centers. Here's the danger to the American people and to our democracy. They're not supposed to be that. They're supposed to do justice. They're supposed to represent the people. They're not supposed to be a political power center. Democrats, Republicans, independents, libertarians, yes. House members, Senate members, the executive branch presidents, yes.
The Supreme Court and the courts, yes. Checks and balances. Founding fathers had the wisdom to create a system like that because they know the corruptibility of man. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So they divided power. That's the beauty and genius of what they did in this country.
They did not foresee coming out of the executive branch would be this tumor, this cancer that really started picking up steam in the 1920s, federal law enforcement, and that it would grow and that the tactics and the methods they used to go after Al Capone or later on, you know, Carlos Escobar and El Chapo and people like that, that they would actually use against governors and presidents.
They didn't foresee that. Problem is, as a practical matter, because they have such power, the politicians are scared shitless of them. They don't want to stand up to them because they're afraid these people will trump up shit against them and just make shit up or get something they might have done and made it bigger.
Correct. And then when you get, you're the one on the wrong end of it, all your friends in politics, they run for the hills, they abandon you. And then all of a sudden, they're kissing your ass the day before you're arrested, and the next day they're maligning the shit out of you. Sounds like Hollywood. Is that right?
Yeah, you're right. Yeah.
Right.
Yeah. It's like your chief of staff and your governor's lawyer and all your friends, people that worked with you and got rich on you. Their choice is, I have to look at my little boy who's three years old and his future, or do I try to defend my boss? Right. Of course. And they make the decision, understandably, for their families.
That's right. They become part of a buddy system. It happens with politicians all the time. You get elected back home in Austin, Texas, and then you go to Washington and get co-opted by the system because you're young and you don't really know, or you're new and you don't know. They show you the ropes, and the ropes are controlled by that deep state, that establishment of...
Showing 421–440 of 701 · page 22 of 36
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