WASHINGTON—One of the defining slogans of President Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016 was “Drain the Swamp” — a promise to clean up Washington politics of corruption and insider influence. So strict was his avowed purity that he presided over regular chants of “Lock her up!” aimed at his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for the infraction of using a personal email account for public business.

His departures in practice from that proclaimed principle have been widely remarked — from appointing lobbyists to his administration, to putting his own children in key government positions and allowing them to trade on his position for business gains, even to having members of his administration use private email accounts for public business.

But in signalling the embrace of murky swampland politics, Tuesday’s use of presidential pardon and clemency power to release one of the most notorious swamp rats from jail stood out.

“We have commuted the sentence of Rod Blagojevich, he served eight years in jail,” Trump told reporters. “That’s a long time.”

It is not as long as the 14 years he was sentenced to serve.

He was the governor of Illinois from 2003 until he was impeached for corruption in 2009. Among his crimes was holding up $8 million in funding to a children’s hospital to extort political campaign fundraising help. More notorious still was his attempt to sell off the Senate seat made vacant by Barack Obama’s election to the presidency: he was recorded by authorities saying of the Senate appointment power, “I’ve got this thing and it’s f--- golden, I’m not just giving it up for f--- nothing.” Among the somethings he sought in exchange for the seat were a cabinet post and $1.5 million in campaign donations.

Swamp water doesn’t get much murkier than that. So what explains Trump’s order of clemency for this one-time Democrat governor?

Illinois Republicans seemed to be at a loss. “I was involved first-hand with the impeachment efforts, and I saw a governor who was rogue on steroids,” Illinois House Republican leader Jim Durkin told reporters. “He abused the office,” Durkin said, noting the supreme court had upheld the sentence. “Why should he get special treatment?”

Trump offered some bits of explanation. He’d seen Blagojevich’s wife on Fox News asking for clemency. And he knew him a bit because the already-disgraced governor appeared on one season of Trump’s reality TV show Celebrity Apprentice in 2010. “Seems like a very nice person,” Trump said.

But he offered some further explanation that seems a bit more on the nose. “He’s a Democrat, he’s not a Republican,” Trump said, and then immediately followed up: “It was a prosecution by Comey, Fitzpatrick, the same people, the same group…” Here he was referring obviously to former FBI director James Comey, and apparently to former Chicago U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

Comey, of course, is the FBI director who launched an investigation into the Trump campaign’s potential connections to Russian interference in the 2016 election, the one that led to the Robert Mueller investigation, and to the convictions of Trump associates Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone.

Fitzgerald is Comey’s personal lawyer, and was appointed a U.S. attorney by Comey. As noted by the website LawandCrime.com, this is the third person prosecuted by Fitzgerald that Trump has pardoned or given clemency to. Earlier he pardoned Scooter Libby (Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway said Fitzgerald acting as a “special counsel gone amok” factored into Trump’s decision) and Conrad Black (who wrote that like Trump, he’d been mistreated by Mueller, Comey and Fitzgerald).

Clearly, Trump has an active interest in discrediting high-profile investigations from James Comey and lawyers close to him — and may view the presidential pardon power as an extension of the campaign of Comey-bashing he regularly engages in during his rallies.

And as many observers have noted, he may be paving the way to pardon his own cronies who were caught in the investigative net Comey threw out — Manafort, Flynn, and Stone.

In the Stone case, for which sentencing is scheduled this week, Trump has been actively tweeting his opposition to a strong sentence. It drew the attention of his generally compliant attorney-general Bill Barr who publicly asked Trump to stop. It has been widely reported Trump has been mulling over a pardon for Stone. Granting clemency to a Democrat jailed for corruption could certainly make it easier to defend a pardon for Stone as something other than swampy partisanship.

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During his huddle with reporters Tuesday discussing Blagojevich, Trump was asked if he was considering a pardon for Stone.

“I haven’t given it any thought,” Trump said.

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