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
And a younger daughter, she's a big Taylor Swift fan, a Swiftie. They both are. But they're good kids. They're honest kids. They do good in school, like their mother. She raised them great without a father. They've suffered through the politics in my career and so public. And the name is not a common name, Blagojevich. There's just not a lot of us here. There are in Serbia, but not in America.
So everybody knows who their dad is, you know, in the political context. So my wife, Patty, you'll find this interesting. Two days after I was arrested, which was the 9th of December 2008, The Thursday of that week, Vegas was betting. They were taking bets. What are the odds the first lady of Illinois is going to leave the governor of Illinois after he just got arrested? And it was nine to one.
I know.
It crossed my mind, actually.
That's what prevented me from even pursuing that. They might criminalize that. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. But when a guy's in prison for more than four years, especially when he has a long time in prison, in more than 90% of the cases, the wife or the significant other leaves. So Patty defied all the odds.
She's made it abundantly clear if I ever run for office again, I'm doing that with my second wife. You don't have to.
Well, I do different work. I do some business stuff. I'm actually trying to do some public awareness on issues that are important, like some criminal justice reform stuff, because I've learned the hard way how just unjust the system is. And there is a bias in the criminal justice system that disproportionately has impacted the black community in a grossly unfair way.
No, but tell me about that. That's criminal justice reform? Yes. Okay.
Yeah. See, that's very impactful.
Right.
Right. The more common thing, Joe, is the over-sentencing part of it. Those eight years in prison, I mean, the overwhelming number of the guys I was with, they did it. They were guilty. The prosecutors got it right. What they got wrong was the sentences are ridiculously unfair and wrong, and they don't match up.
And you got a nonviolent offender who first time did something wrong, whether it's a bank robbery or a drug offense or whatever it might be. And they're giving these guys 15, 20, 25 years because they have these one-size-fits-all sentencing guidelines that the politicians pass. But every case is different. Every person is different. Their backgrounds are different.
Their causes, the reasons for doing things, they're different. So the system is broken in the sense that they don't take into account other considerations than just these like – formulas they follow. And so as a result, you got these people, disproportionately black, but not exclusively, who are doing these long sentences for first-time offenses.
Trump pardoned a woman named Alice Marie Johnson, first-time nonviolent offender, drugs. They gave her a life sentence. It was probably a lot of drugs, a life sentence. And after 20 years, Trump pulled her out, saved her. And a lot of this came from the 1994 crime bill that Joe Biden sponsored and Bill Clinton passed. The So I think I do some of that.
My father came from Serbia, and I'd like to try to do what I can to raise public awareness about the place of Serbia in the Balkans, because it's a country that we bombed in 1999, the United States and NATO bombed Serbia without the United Nations approval. the way Russia's invaded Ukraine.
Because they were trying to force the Serbian government to give up a part of their country, Kosovo. Give it up. That'd be like NATO threatening to bomb us to say, give up Texas to Mexico. And the Serbian government said, we're not going to do it.
And so the United States decided to bomb them if they didn't sign an agreement that was made in France called the Rambouillet Agreement that would have put it up to a referendum.
There's more to everything, but the complication is the geopolitics of Europe and the Middle East, because Serbia and the Balkans is sort of a gateway to the Middle East. It's in Europe, but it's a gateway to the Middle East, and a lot of the political dynamics internationally are at play there. But the Serbs and the Serbian people were allies with the United States in both world wars.
They love America. They want to improve relations with America today after we bombed them. The Clinton administration did that. Took that part of their country away.
They bombed Belgrade. They bombed all the big cities.
Showing 541–560 of 701 · page 28 of 36
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