Patti cries. 'Hot' Rod Blagojevich lies. Trump buys it?

Rod Blagojevich spent six years treating Illinois like his personal ATM, with no moral compunction about leveraging either dying kids or a U.S. Senate seat for cash.

And trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated when Barack Obama left for the White House in 2008 was just the final act of betraying the trust of the people of Illinois. Blags said it best when the FBI caught him on wiretap: "I've got this thing and it's (expletive) golden, and, uh, uh, I'm just not giving it up for (expletive) nothing. I'm not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there."

His parachute landed him in prison, but don't forget all the other sins being repaid through 14 years of his life behind bars.

He tried to trade putting Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett into the senate seat in exchange for his own appointment to Obama's cabinet or as U.N. ambassador.

He tried to hold up state funds to hire specialists to save sick kids at a children's hospital until its chief came up with a $25,000 contribution. He tried to trade state benefits to a horse race track owner for a $100,000 contribution. He sought $500,000 from a guy who wanted to create a tollway.

Convicted. The fourth Illinois governor out of the past 10 to see prison in a state nationally notorious for corruption.

So now the short memories and revisionist history starts. His wife, Patti Blagojevich, trots out the tears and her suffering girls. Rod gets the Wall Street Journal to run his twisted white-washing of his sins as a guest editorial.

And our president, with his notoriously short attention span, buys into it, or wants to poke at the FBI, or wants to help his old contestant from "The Apprentice."

“Plenty of other politicians have said a lot worse,” Trump said. “And it doesn’t, he shouldn’t have been put in jail.”

Wrong, Mr. President. Inmate No. 40892-424 is exactly where he should be until at least 2024.

This story was originally published May 31, 2018 at 5:57 PM with the headline "Patti cries. 'Hot' Rod Blagojevich lies. Trump buys it?."