A discreet effort is underway to explore the possibility of President Donald J. Trump pardoning former Gov. John G. Rowland for his convictions in two federal criminal cases, including one that contributed to his resignation as Connecticut’s governor amid an impeachment inquiry in July 2004. 

“I am aware people are talking about it, probably because the Trump administration has made a strong commitment to doing more pardons including appointing a pardon czar, but I have not made an application for one,” Rowland said Friday in an email.

He declined further comment.

Trump began his second term on Jan. 20, 2025, with a sweeping clemency order for 1,500 people implicated in the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, and he created a new clemency post a month later, naming Alice Williams as the White House “pardon czar.” 

“You’ve been an inspiration to people, and we’re going to be listening to your recommendation on pardons,” Trump said. 

Williams, 69, had served 21 years in prison on a nonviolent drug crime before Trump commuted her sentence in 2018 and then pardoned her in 2020 hours after she addressed the Republican National Convention. Still, the path to a pardon is not clearly mapped, as evidenced by calls on Rowland’s behalf.

Fred Camillo, the first selectman of Greenwich, said he recently was approached about whether he could recommend anyone capable of furthering the cause of a Rowland pardon. Camillo attributed the call to the perception that an elected CEO in Greenwich must have valuable contacts.

Camillo declined to identify the caller.

“We get these calls all the time,” said Camillo, a Republican elected as first selectman in 2019. He is a former state representative first elected to the House in 2008, four years after Rowland resigned as governor. “I certainly know people in the administration.”

One of Trump’s cabinet officers, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, is from Greenwich. But Camillo was uncertain as to whether he could help make a contact with McMahon.

The White House had no immediate comment.

Rowland’s friendship with the Bush family presumably would be of no help with a pardon, given Trump’s disdain of a political dynasty with roots in Greenwich, which also was Trump’s home during his first marriage.

“We need another Bush in office about as much as we need Obama to have a 3rd term,” Trump wrote in 2013. “No more Bushes!”

But the president has been sympathetic to politicians who claim their prosecutions were politically motivated. A case in point: his commutation and eventual pardon of Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois.

He was convicted in 2011 on charges related to trying to sell an appointment to the U.S. Senate, a vacancy created by Barack Obama’s election as president. Blagojevich had served eight years of a 14-year sentence when Trump commuted his sentence in 2020. 

Trump, who had faced federal indictments related to the Jan. 6 effort to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling of classified documents, expressed a certain solidarity with Blagojevich in signing a pardon in February.

“I’ve watched him. He was set up by a lot of bad people, some of the same people I had to deal with,” Trump said.

Rowland was elected to Congress at age 27 in 1984 and to the first of his three terms as governor in 1994.

Facing impeachment and a federal investigation into bid-rigging involving gifts and favors from state contractors, Rowland resigned July 1, 2004, and pleaded guilty to a corruption charge Dec. 23, 2004. Three months later, he was sentenced to a year and a day in prison, ultimately serving 10 months.

In speeches after his release, Rowland blamed his fall on a “sense of entitlement” and an “arrogance of power.” In one talk to students, he called his fall surreal, saying it seemed he was visiting George W. Bush in the White House one day then standing in line for toilet paper in prison the next.

He was indicted a second time in 2014, accused of soliciting congressional candidates in 2010 and 2012 to secretly pay him as a consultant in campaigns for his old 5th Congressional District seat.

Mark Greenberg rebuffed him in 2010, but Lisa Wilson-Foley agreed to secretly pay for his help in 2012, arranging for her husband’s nursing home company to disguise $35,000 in campaign expenditures to Rowland as a business expense. The government said Wilson-Foley wanted Rowland’s help without the public disclosure required by federal campaign finance laws.

At the time he was secretly working for Wilson-Foley’s campaign, he was the host of a popular evening drive-time show on WTIC-AM. He was convicted and sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Rowland, now 67, raised money for the Prison Fellowship after his second release. He was among the VIP mourners at the recent funeral of his former lieutenant and successor, M. Jodi Rell.