Julie and Todd Chrisley were not exactly prepared to learn they had been pardoned by the president.
“Unfortunately, most of the news that you get in prison is bad news,” Julie Chrisley told Lara Trump in a family interview set to air Saturday on Fox News Channel. So when she got the good news, her fellow inmates didn’t immediately understand what they were seeing.
“They’re like, ‘Are you OK?’” Julie said.
In fact, she hadn’t been 100% OK when she first heard from daughter Savannah that President Trump had signed off on the creme de la creme of get-out-of-jail-free cards.
“I just busted out crying” when her daughter broke the news, Julie said. “Everyone was looking around, and then I just hung up. I was so nervous that I just hung up.”
Savannah was the one who appealed to the president to free her parents. During the Republican National Convention, she gave a speech about the “rogue prosecutors” who put her parents behind bars.
At least Julie hung up on her daughter and not POTUS. But now the folks around her were asking her if she was OK. “I’m like, ‘I am!’” she said, grasping her husband and daughter’s hands as she recalled the moment. “I’m getting out of here!”
Julie and husband Todd, the Georgia couple who gained fame through “Chrisley Knows Best,” the USA Network series that showcased their luxurious lifestyle and zany family dynamic, were back in their bleach-blond glory sitting with two of their five kids, Savannah and son Chase, on Lara Trump’s couch.
There had been no hair color for the inmates after they were sentenced to 12 years (him) and seven years (her) for tax evasion, conspiracy and wire fraud. He was sent to a federal prison in Pensacola, Fla., while she was doing time in Lexington, Ky. Probation after incarceration awaited them both. The pardons changed all that.
Todd Chrisley was a little cooler than his wife had been when the news came his way. He was walking through FPC Pensacola when someone stopped him and told him he just got pardoned.
“I said, ‘Yeah, OK’ and I just went right on walking,” apparently dismissing what he’d just heard as trash talk. He walked all the way back to his dorm, only to have a corrections officer come by soon after and ask him if he was “good.”
“I said, ‘As good as I can be,’” he told Lara Trump with a little snark in his delivery. But the CO was serious.
The officer told the reality star that he had been pardoned and that he’d been sent to check on Chrisley to make sure he was OK.
Todd recalled saying, “They don’t need to be worried about me now! If I’m pardoned, I’m great!”
The Chrisley patriarch also shared how it felt when he saw wife Julie for the first time in 28 months.
“When I hugged her the first time, it was like I was home. … We have changed,” he said. “And if we did not change in these 28 months, it would have been wasted.”
Todd gave it up to the Almighty as well. “God touched President Trump’s heart,” he said. “God led the people to advocate for us. And so I’m grateful, because every night I would pray that God would return me home to my children. And he did that, so I’m grateful.”
Both Chrisleys have said they intend to advocate in the future for prisoners who are still behind bars.
“My View With Lara Trump,” which includes her full interview with Todd, Julie, Savannah and Chase Chrisley, airs Saturday at 6 p.m. local time (9 p.m. Eastern) on Fox News Channel.
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