Trump pardons former Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich
Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump has signed an executive order pardoning Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who was sentenced to 14 years in prison before Trump commuted his sentence in 2020.
“It’s my honor to do it,” Trump said during remarks from the Oval Office on Monday. “He was set up.”
Trump called the Democratic former governor a “very fine person” and said he didn’t know him other than that he was on his TV show, “Celebrity Apprentice.”
When asked if Trump would consider Blagojevich as ambassador to Serbia, Trump said “no, but I would,” adding that “if he got a pardon, he’s cleaner than anybody in the room.”
“Let me tell you — from the bottom of my heart — how deep my appreciation and gratitude is for President Trump,” Blagojevich said in a press conference Monday evening reacting to the news.
The past few months, Blagojevich has been active on X, expressing his support for the president and reposting content from Trump’s inner circle, including Elon Musk and Kash Patel, Trump’s choice to be director of the FBI.
“Trump freed me & Obama sold me out so I’m biased, but I believe Trump has done more as President in his whirlwind first 8 days than Obama did in his entire 8 years. What do you think?” Balgojevich wrote on X last month.
Blagojevich, a Democrat and self-proclaimed “Trump-o-crat,” responded to former President Joe Biden’s preemptive pardons in January, telling Piers Morgan Uncensored that he believed such actions were the “wrong things to do.”
“I mean, President Biden weaponized the justice department against Donald Trump. So he just assumed that Trump’s going to do the same thing to his people that he did to Trump and to Trump’s people,” he said, adding that “there’s no evidence that President Trump is going to do anything.”
On his first day back in office, Trump announced sweeping pardons and commutations for nearly all of the rioters charged with the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
“I pardon people that were assaulted themselves. They were assaulted by our government,” Trump said on Sunday in regards to his Jan. 6 pardons.
In 2011, Blagojevich was convicted on 17 counts of corruption, including an attempt to sell the U.S. Senate seat that former President Barack Obama vacated after being elected to the White House in 2008.
During his first term, Trump called Blagojevich’s 14-year sentence a “tremendously powerful, ridiculous” sentence, though he had also expressed that he did not know Blagojevich well.
The former governor was expected to be released in 2024, factoring in two years of credit for good behavior. He began serving time in 2012, and Trump commuted his sentence in 2020.
Upon release, Blagojevich expressed his “profound and everlasting gratitude for President Trump,” calling this an “act of kindness” that represented the “beginning of the process to actually turn an injustice into a justice.”
“He didn’t have to do this, he’s a Republican president, I was a Democratic governor,” Blagojevich also said at the time.
In 2009 while appearing on NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice,” Blagojevich can be seen getting “fired” by Trump.
(WASHINGTON) — Lambda Legal and Human Rights Campaign, two leading LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, filed a federal lawsuit on Thursday challenging the Trump administration over the president’s executive order banning transgender people from serving in the military.
The lawsuit, which was obtained by ABC News, was filed in the U.S. District Court-Western District of Washington on behalf of six active duty transgender service members, a transgender person seeking to enlist in the military, as well as Seattle human rights organization Gender Justice League.
“By categorically excluding transgender people, the 2025 Military Ban and related federal policy and directives violate the equal protection and due process guarantees of the Fifth Amendment and the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment,” the lawsuit said. “They lack any legitimate or rational justification, let alone the compelling and exceedingly persuasive ones required. Accordingly, Plaintiffs seek declaratory, and preliminary and permanent injunctive, relief.”
U.S. Navy Commander Emily “Hawking” Shilling, who according to the lawsuit has been serving in the military for 19 years, criticized the ban in a statement, saying that the measure is “not about readiness or cohesion, and it is certainly not about merit.”
“It is about exclusion and betrayal, purposely targeting those of us who volunteered to serve, simply for having the courage and integrity to live our truth,” Shilling said.
The lawsuit comes after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 28, rescinding Biden administration policies that permitted transgender service members to serve openly in the military based on their gender identity.
The order directed the Department of Defense to revise the Pentagon’s policy on transgender service members and stated that “expressing a false “gender identity” divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.”
The order further argued that receiving gender-affirming medical care is one of the conditions that is physically and mentally “incompatible with active duty.”
“Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” the order continued.
“The assertion that transgender service members like myself are inherently untrustworthy or lack honor is an insult to all who have dedicated their lives to defending this country,” Shilling said in the statement.
Trump issued a similar order during his first term in office that was challenged in the courts and now HRC and Lambda Legal have joined other leading advocacy groups in challenging the order in the courts.
GLAD Law and The National Center for Lesbian Rights also filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on behalf of six transgender service members on Jan. 28.
ABC News has reached out to the Trump administration but a request for comment was not immediately returned.
(WASHINGTON) — A former top Justice Department immigration official who was removed from her position by new DOJ leadership this week told ABC News that she did not receive any explanation for her removal.
Lauren Alder Reid was one of four top officials from the agency that operates the U.S. immigration courts who was removed from her post. She had been with the agency for more than 14 years.
“They did not give me any reason, other than not citing the 16 years of outstanding performance evaluation for lack of any discipline, administrative leave or reassignment in my entire career,” Reid told ABC News.
The firings come as President Donald Trump has signed a flurry of immigration executive orders after vowing on the campaign trail to clamp down on immigration and undo Biden-era policies.
When asked if she’s considering legal action, Reid, who was the assistant director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s office of policy, said that she and the others are considering all options available to them.
“It’s pretty hard to sit back and imagine that this could begin to happen, at will, to any employee throughout the government, especially when we’re talking about public servants who have dedicated their careers to try to make our country the best,” she said.
The Justice Department employs about 700 immigration judges who decide whether migrants seeking asylum in the United States can remain in the country legally. There is currently an historic backlog of 3.5 million cases.
Reid said drastic reform is needed to address the backlog, saying, “Congress needs to act.”
Asked what message her removal sends to other career officials in the federal government, Reid said that employees are fearful. “If fear is what they wanted, that’s what they’re getting,” Reid said.
(WASHINGTON) — Executive orders signed recently by President Donald Trump state that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs prioritize diversity over merit in hiring, claiming DEI efforts are an “immense public waste and shameful discrimination.”
Some experts in the DEI field disagree, and several tell ABC News that diversity, equity and inclusion programs are aimed at creating a true merit-based system, where hiring, salaries, retention and promotions are decided without bias or discrimination toward employees.
Before the anti-discrimination legislative movement of the 1960s — including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 — discrimination against certain groups was widespread, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“If you were from a dominant group — generally white people, generally men, straight, cisgender, fully-abled — you had a huge leg up in terms of getting employment recommendations, higher pay promotions,” Erica Foldy, a professor at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, told ABC News.
She continued, “So, Trump and his allies are harking back to this time that they say was more merit-based, but that’s not at all how these organizations operated.”
DEI initiatives — like implementing accessibility measures for people with disabilities, addressing gender pay inequity, diversifying recruitment outreach, or holding anti-discrimination trainings — are intended to correct discriminatory organizational practices, experts say.
DEI experts argue that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are “on the path of creating more merit-based companies, more merit-based firms,” Foldy said, aiming to ensure that qualified people of all backgrounds have an “equal chance of being hired; you’re going to be paid the same as employees at comparable levels.”
“Business as usual, without attention to discrimination, is deeply, deeply inequitable,” Foldy said.
Amri Johnson, a DEI expert and author, told ABC News that the ideal of meritocracy operates under the assumption “that opportunities are fair.” Today, studies across industries continue to show that discrimination against a person’s race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, military background, or other factors continues to permeate the job market.
“If organizations truly want the best talent, companies need to be intentional about how they source and engage with talent,” said Johnson.
Each year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission plays a role in hundreds of legal cases concerning ongoing discrimination against protected classes in the workplace.
The EEOC’s 2023 performance report offers a long list of lawsuits it settled or won that year. One lawsuit noted blatant racist graffiti or comments made by fellow employees, paired with the discriminatory designation of hard physical labor solely for Black employees; others noted the failures of several employers to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant or disabled workers that led to the employee’s termination or job offers rescinded.
One study found that racial and ethnic discrimination in hiring continues to be a problem globally.
“Relative to white applicants, applicants of color from all backgrounds in the study had to submit about 50% more applications per callback on average,” according to research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that analyzed 90 studies involving 174,000 total fake job applications tweaked to include racial indicators but with otherwise similar professional credentials.
“Diversity doesn’t go away because DEI goes away. It is an inevitable part of any human community (business or otherwise),” said Johnson. “Not learning how to deal with its tensions and complexity is leaving value on the table.”
Some DEI experts point to research from management consulting firm McKinsey & Company that found that companies with more diversity financially and socially outperform those that are less diverse.
“The most successful companies understand that DEI isn’t just a ‘”nice-to-have,'” said Christie Smith, the former vice president for inclusion and diversity at Apple, in a written statement. “It’s a driver of innovation, talent attraction, and competitive advantage. The question is whether leaders will have the courage to stay the course and hold firm against political headwinds.”
On Thursday, Trump claimed, without citing evidence, that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration were partly to blame for the tragic plane and helicopter collision in Washington on Wednesday night.
The accusation comes after Trump signed sweeping orders aiming to terminate “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” programs in or sponsored by the federal government and its contractors.
The White House argues that DEI programs “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”
“Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great,” reads Trump’s executive order.
The order revokes several decades-old or years-old executive actions, including the 1965 Equal Employment Opportunity order prohibiting hiring discrimination by federal contractors and its amendments expanding professional development, data collection and retention opportunities.
The order also explicitly revokes a 1994 order to develop environmental justice strategies that address disproportionately high health and environmental impacts faced by low-income or minority communities.
Among the list of orders that are now revoked is a 2011 order requiring federal agencies to develop strategies “to identify and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity.”
Those in favor of axing DEI programs argue that these initiatives could lead to lawsuits claiming discrimination following the Supreme Court’s ruling on SFFA v. Harvard that disallows race to be taken into consideration in college applications.
The National Center for Public Policy Research has been a strong advocate against DEI, submitting shareholder proposals to reverse the DEI policies at major companies like Costco, John Deere, and others. Ethan Peck, deputy director for the NCPPR’s Free Enterprise Project, told ABC News that such companies should be “colorblind.”
“We’re saying that companies have an obligation, a legal obligation, and an obligation to their shareholders, and an obligation to their employees to treat everybody the same, regardless of their race and sex, and we’d submit any proposal to keep that that way,” Peck said.
