Amy Blagojevich and Barack Obama (Facebook/Wikimedia Commons)
Rod Blagojevich’s oldest daughter, Amy, has written a harsh letter to former President Barack Obama after he failed to commute her father’s sentence before leaving office.
The “long-suffering” 20-year-old asked her mother, Patti, to share her nearly 1,600-word letter on Facebook Thursday, Jan. 26. Among her many criticisms, Amy said Obama “betrayed the concept of justice.”
“I thought you were different,” she said. “I thought you had a moral compass. Turns out you’re just like the rest — selfish and spineless.”
Amy wrote that she and her sister, Anne, wrote letters to Obama expressing their “heartache and our desperation,” alleging the 44th Commander in Chief was aware of “emotional beatings we’ve taken repeatedly over the last eight years; the kicks in the gut when we were already on the ground, the knives in our backs.” She said she understood why Obama wouldn’t commute her 60-year-old father’s sentence while he was in office, but thought he would do so before his final term ended.
“I couldn’t fathom a reason why you wouldn’t — your career wasn’t at stake anymore. You know as well as anyone, that my father is guilty of nothing,” she said. “He made mistakes — he’s human, after all — but nothing was illegal. I thought you would fix it … You didn’t have to pardon him, only commute the sentence. You just had to let him come home. You didn’t.”
Rod Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years in prison on corruption charges that included trying to sell the Senate seat Obama left vacant when he became president in 2008. The former Illinois governor has served four years so far and is due out in 2024.
Amy slammed the lengthy sentence as “extreme” and called out Obama for granting Chelsea Manning’s release, who leaked confidential military information to Wikileaks, and keeping Rod in prison.
Elsewhere in the letter, Amy discussed losing faith in God and justice and said she has suffered from depression, insomnia, anxiety and “aspects of PTSD.” She later called into question how Obama’s daughters would feel if he had been incarcerated.
“Wouldn’t you do anything to spare them the agony of visiting you in prison? Don’t you want the best for them?” she asked. “If the answer to any of these is ‘yes,’ then you should’ve commuted the sentence in a heartbeat. Since you didn’t, it’s my belief that you are either a horrible parent or a horrible person. Either way, like I said before, I’ve lost my respect for you.
“I’m glad you’re gone. I’m not delusional — you’re not a saint. You were a mediocre president with unoriginal ideas,” the Northwestern University student said, alleging Obama stole the idea for his Affordable Care Act from an Alabama children’s health initiative called All Kids.
“At least now I can see the blood on your hands,” Amy concluded. “You can keep washing them, but they’ll never be clean. You were a bystander to a completely un-American act of injustice. You’re just as guilty as those who created it in the first place.”
