(NewsNation) — Former President Donald Trump will face his historic booking and arraignment on hush money charges related to allegations of sexual encounters in a New York courtroom.
Former Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich said on NewsNation’s “Morning in America” that Tuesday is a “dark day,” as the nation awaits the specific charges against Trump, which have remained unknown, sealed in the indictment.
“This is a dark day for America, the idea that you would arrest any citizen, but a president of the United States, for things that aren’t crimes,” Blagojevich said.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is investigating Trump’s role in the scheme and whether he violated business accounting laws and campaign finance laws by making the payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
Trump, who denies the sexual encounters, called the indictment “political persecution” and an attempt to interfere in his presidential campaign.
New York veteran Judge Juan Merchan is presiding over the case.
The interview has been edited and paraphrased for length and clarity.
NewsNation: What similarities are there between what happened to you and what’s happening to the 45th president of the United States?
Blagojevich: The similarities is I went to prison for things that aren’t crimes, things that are political. What they’re doing to a Republican president at the major league level, they did to a Democratic governor at the AAA level. I do believe that my case was a test case that these uncontrolled, weaponized prosecutors would go after high-ranking political figures who they can’t beat in elections, or don’t want to win elections, and upset and overturn our democracy, because that’s what this is. This is a very dangerous thing for our freedoms, for our republic, for democracy.
NewsNation: Do you think it’s as big as war? Do you think that this means war in politics and for our nation in terms of the culture shift that we’ve been seeing over the past few years?
Blagojevich: These things don’t happen overnight; they’re gradual. This is getting worse and worse. Now, one thing you can say about the Democrat prosecutor of Manhattan is he keeps his campaign promises, because he ran on a promise to indict Trump before he even had any evidence to think that there were crimes, and there aren’t any crimes here.
What he’s also doing is, while he’s keeping his campaign promises, he’s betraying his duty, his oath of office to protect the rule of law in the Constitution. The real problem is, this is the kind of stuff they do in Russia, that kind of stuff they do, the former Soviet Union; this is KGB police state-style politics.
NewsNation: What about people who would say that it’s a narrative that’s being pushed? Are we hearing things, whether it’s from the media or from just hype, political hype, that are causing us to think there’s some type of controversy here when there’s not?
Blagojevich: I’m a Democrat, but I’m an American first, and this is bad for our country. We shouldn’t weaponize the prosecutors’ power to go after any political figure unless you got real corruption, and this is not real corruption. The problem now is it’s so hyper-partisan and political that Reverend Sharpton and Democrats and others are all over this.
The other problem is that if Trump gets elected president, I hope the Republicans don’t do this to Democrats, that this is the new politics, and this will destroy our freedoms. This will destroy our democracy. This is not what this American system was supposed to be about.
What should Americans, who are never going to run for political office but are voters, care about the most when it comes to a case like this?
That justice is done, and that prosecutors do their jobs. The job of a prosecutor is not to get somebody. The job of a prosecutor is to do justice. And when a prosecutor sees that someone didn’t do it, leave them alone and exonerate them.
We have a broken and a racist criminal justice system. Now, we have a broken, racist and weaponized criminal justice system. We have a lot of work to do, I think, to reform the criminal justice system and hold these uncontrolled, weaponized prosecutors accountable for things that I believe are criminal. And that is framing political leaders and throwing them in jail like they did to me because I didn’t break the law.