Knowing his best chance at freedom still lies in the hands of President Donald Trump, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich has argued in a new column that Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives today would have impeached Abraham Lincoln.
In the column, published Wednesday by Newsmax, Blagojevich acknowledged his own impeachment and went on to offer his “unique perspective about impeachment as I sit here in prison.”
The 63-year-old Blagojevich, who was convicted on corruption charges, is not due to leave prison until March 2024. He and his wife, former Illinois First Lady Patti Blagojevich, have been openly courting Trump for clemency for nearly two years.
Last summer, it appeared for a moment that their campaign might have worked. Trump told reporters in August he was “thinking about commuting (Blagojevich’s) sentence very strongly.” But the president never got around to freeing the former politician, and Blagojevich remains in a Colorado prison facility.
Now, two weeks after the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump, Blagojevich asked in his new column, “would Speaker (Nancy) Pelosi’s House Democrats use the same flimsy impeachment standard they are currently using to impeach Honest Abe, one of the greatest presidents in the history of our country?”
Blagojevich wrote that “today’s Democrats” would have impeached Lincoln for obstruction of Congress and abuse of power over the Emancipation Proclamation, for “Confederate Collusion” for offering Robert E. Lee command of the northern army, for suspending the writ of habeas corpus, and for the “routine horse trading” that helped Lincoln secure the presidential nomination.
“It is hard to imagine how history would have been changed had Lincoln been impeached,” Blagojevich wrote. “Thankfully, that never happened. But to think that it could have happened is a reminder of how fragile our Republic is and how vulnerable our freedoms are.”
