Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2245 - Rod Blagojevich
Uploaded: 2024-12-18T18:00:36.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2245 - Rod Blagojevich' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-12-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2245 - Rod Blagojevich' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-12-18. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2245 - Rod Blagojevich

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
How are you, sir?
I'm good.
Nice to see you.
Nice to meet you.
I really enjoyed you on Tucker Carlson's show.
Shout out to Tucker.
It was a very eye-opening podcast.
And, you know, whenever someone is convicted of, you know, any political figure,
any person of power that's convicted of corruption, you automatically assume
that they're guilty.
And after listening to you on Tucker's show, I was like, oh, Jesus.
Like, it was such an eye-opening podcast and such a disappointing one, too.
It was so disturbing to hear your version of the story, which was so different
than the version
that was, you know, put out on the media.
And it was just, oh, corrupt politician goes to jail.
I went to jail.
They must be guilty.
And then you hear your take on it.
You're like, oh, God.
It's very disturbing.
And I just wanted to show you this just before we get rolling.
Biden just released a bunch of people, multiple Chinese spies and an individual
convicted of
possessing child pornography.
I think he's released, how many people has he pardoned today?
I saw number 1,500.
He's going ham.
Everybody can get their, sign your checks, send them in.
Let's go.
Wow.
Wow.
Possession of child pornography should be like, you shouldn't be able to pardon
for stuff like
that.
It's like, there's certain things.
It's like, come on.
You know, I spent almost eight years in prison for politics, not for crimes.
I'm happy to answer any questions you have about any of it, because I didn't do
it.
It was all politics.
But the first three years, almost three years, they put me in a higher security
prison, and
I'm in there with Crips and Bloods and Gangster Disciples and Sinaloa Cartel
drug dealers.
Why would they do that?
They were squeezing me and pressuring me, because they wanted me to basically
say I did something
that I didn't do.
They wanted me to plead guilty to non-crimes.
So they wanted to scare you by putting you in with dangerous people.
Yeah.
And they really punished me, because I fought back in a way that no one really
does, except
for Trump.
I mean, I was fighting back when they brought those charges against me
everywhere, and I was calling
them criminals.
What did they expect you to do?
They expect you to just take a sentence, a lower sentence, and confess?
Exactly.
What did they offer you?
They tried me twice after the first trial, where they failed to convict me on
their fake
corruption charges.
They were floating 18 months.
And, you know, there were a lot of people in my team, like my lawyers, who
thought that
might be the prudent thing to do, because you really can't beat these people.
The system is rigged, and when they really want to get you, they'll just keep
trying you,
and they'll get their judge to work with them, and they'll ultimately convict
you, as they
did me, by using unlawful standards to criminalize things that are legal in
politics and government.
So the prudent thing, the safe thing, was to, you know, cut your losses and,
you know, take
the short period of prison time.
But I felt, you know, I wasn't a businessman.
I suppose if I was a businessman facing something like that, you'd make a
business decision,
you cut your losses, you realize they're bleeding you financially, you can't
afford lawyers,
this is going to be an endless thing.
It was already three years at that point that we had been fighting it.
But I was the governor, twice elected by the people.
And, you know, I know these votes don't mean a lot to some people.
It sounds like a bunch of bullshit to say I swore in the Holy Bible as the
governor to
preserve, protect the rule of law, the Constitution.
I just couldn't do it.
And I knew it was all bullshit.
It was all corrupt.
They knew it was all corrupt.
And it was all an effort to try to get me to admit it.
And if I admitted it, then the truth would never come out.
They can never be exposed for what they did.
And because I wouldn't do it, and I fought back, because if I'm right, and I
know I am,
and they were doing to me what they ultimately ended up doing to Trump, weaponizing
their
uncontrolled power and unlimited resources to criminalize political things, if
the truth
comes out, they're going to be facing some sort of accountability, hopefully
one day.
And hopefully now with the new administration, they'll reform the laws.
Well, you saw that the head of the FBI just stepped down.
Yep.
And Kash Patel is going to come in, and he wants to clean house.
Let's take it back to the beginning.
So I know they were bugging your phones, but you kind of knew they were bugging
your phones, right?
You know, when you come out of Chicago politics, which is a politics that
probably has a larger
proportion of corruption than other—
That's how they got JFK elected.
Other places, yeah.
The mob was involved in that.
Yeah.
That's well done.
The river wards made the difference.
Mayor Daley, the first Mayor Daley, was holding back the counting of those
votes until he saw
what Southern Illinois Republican area came up with.
And once those votes were counted, then he let those river wards come out.
And Giancana, people like that, were really instrumental in electing Kennedy.
And then when Bobby Kennedy started going after Giancana, as the attorney
general, they felt betrayed.
Rightly so.
Yeah, of course.
But—
A deal's a deal, right?
I mean, apparently the father made the deal, right?
But with me, it was—I always felt that there was a possibility that not only
would they be
listening, but that somebody would set you up.
And through the years in politics, people would.
They'd come to you and offer you things that you knew were illegal.
And you didn't do it because it was illegal.
But also, you felt this could be a setup.
This could be the FBI trying to entrap you into doing something.
And that's a common thing?
Not an uncommon thing.
So when you—what was the first charge that was brought against you?
Or if you could just bring us back to the moment when you knew they were coming
after you.
I was elected the first Democratic governor in Illinois in November 2002 after
26 years of
Republican governors.
I first learned that they began to look into my administration and people
around me in December
of 2003.
And I had been governor for 10 months, and they were already looking.
And I knew it, which meant we got to be super extra careful because these
people are scrutinizing
us.
On the one hand, I felt, good, that puts pressure on people around me and
people are doing work
for me to do the legal things and not cross lines.
I never imagined that the FBI and the Department of Justice and these U.S.
attorneys who come
out of the best schools would be so corrupt and dishonest.
I felt like, okay, they'll look and see how we do things.
And if we make some mistakes along the way, we'll make adjustments.
So they chased me for five years.
And by the time they taped my phones, it was no surprise.
There was all kinds of pressure at that time because they'd gotten a guy who
was close to
me and Obama, a guy by the name of Tony Oresko, who they probably convicted him
of things that
weren't crimes either.
They were squeezing him to say things about me and Obama.
He wouldn't do it.
They put him into solitary confinement for three years to get him to invent
crimes against
us.
He wouldn't do it.
This guy's a stand-up guy.
Obama sold him out.
And he did more for Obama than he ever did for me.
But I knew all of that.
And so at the time when they began wiretapping my phones, which is late October
2008, everything
I talked about doing with regard to the appointment of Obama's successor to the
United States Senate,
I felt it was very possible they were listening.
How could they not?
Because they were chasing me, they so much wanted to get me.
And Obama and I both were in their crosshairs in the very beginning.
But I think the politics of the changes, his political fortunes improved and he
looked like
he was going to be the next president.
And these people, these U.S. attorneys get appointed by the president.
And these were Bush-appointed, Cheney-appointed prosecutors.
And it's very unusual that the previous administration's prosecutors stay in
office.
When the new president comes in, they leave.
As you see with Trump and the other parties, people come in.
But these people stayed in.
And when they arrested me, what they wanted me to do was to basically say that
I was guilty
of trying to sell a Senate seat.
And I was trying to sell it to another guilty party, who was the guy who
started the whole
thing, by the name of Barack Obama, who wanted to buy that Senate seat.
Because that's where the whole thing began.
It was Obama on election night.
He sent an emissary to me to suggest a political deal because he wanted this
woman named Valerie
Jarrett to be appointed to his Senate seat.
The governor appointed to the Senate.
Pause for a second.
Hold that thought.
Jamie, there's feedback.
You hear that?
You hear that vibe?
That...
It was on the last podcast, too.
Really?
Yeah, it's gone.
Oh.
Just ended.
All right.
What was that?
On Mike Gordon.
Yep, that's it.
Okay.
All right, we're back.
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So, Obama was...
So, how did he try to negotiate?
Like, when he wanted this person to take his Senate seat, what was set?
How did it go down?
How do things like that work?
He used third parties, emissaries.
So, he doesn't have to meet with you.
So, you can say, Obama asked me.
You have other people.
So, there's plausible deniability.
To some extent.
That's part of it, of course.
But there's other dynamics.
But also, it's just a little bit easier to kind of test the mood of the other
person.
If you have a third party who both the people like or respect.
In this particular case, it was a labor boss by the name of Tom Balinoff.
He came up to me election night in November 2008.
That was the election.
You voted for Obama.
You and I are both guilty of that.
And I was there that night.
Chicago was magical.
You know?
Historic.
And it was great.
In the sense t