Former U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm, who was working as a Newsmax host until a fall from a horse during a polo tournament left him paralyzed, said in an interview with the network Friday night that one of his main goals in his recovery is to come back to work.
“To be completely frank, I can’t wait to get back with you guys hosting again at Newsmax,” he said in a candid interview with Newsmax’s “Greg Kelly Reports.” “I’m very excited about getting back on air. I know it’s going to be pretty soon that I’ll be back on air. I’ll be doing interviews like this with some other shows, but I’m very excited about getting back with Newsmax and just getting life back together again.”
He noted that Newsmax’s viewers have been “so supportive of me” and that their “generosity has been amazing.”
“I want to say thank you to everyone who donated,” Grimm said. “The cost of my recovery is obscene. It’s millions upon millions of dollars…I couldn’t do it without everyone who has been so generous.”
Grimm, who has also served as a U.S. Marine and an FBI agent, was paralyzed when he was thrown from a horse while playing polo last September. A GoFundMe account has been established to help defray some of the costs of his ongoing recovery efforts.
Grimm on Friday, while discussing his recovery efforts, also talked about his most recent news: A full pardon from President Donald Trump.
The former lawmaker, who represented a Staten Island district, was sentenced to eight months in prison after pleading guilty to felony tax evasion charges in 2014. He admitted to underreporting employee wages at Healthalicious, a restaurant he co-owned before he started his political career.
“It’s beyond overwhelming,” Grimm said of the pardon, handed down in late May. “I mean, this changes my life for myself and my family, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. As you know, I’m facing a lot of challenges since I broke my neck falling off a horse, and it just put the wind back in my sails.”
Trump, he added, “knew it was lawfare against me and that I should never have been prosecuted … he is not only an amazing president, he may be the best president we’ve ever had.”
Grimm added that he had been told that a deal was made with Loretta Lynch, then the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, “that if she could get me on anything, spitting on the sidewalk, it didn’t matter, as long as I was out of Congress she would be the next attorney general of the United States … two months after the bogus indictment, she was attorney general of the United States.”
But now, Grimm said he’s focused on his recovery, and said he thanks God that he is alive.
“Doctors told my family not once, but twice,” said Grimm, explaining that several vertebrae were “completely demolished” in his neck.
“Then I had pneumonia,” he said. “I was on a ventilator. I was intubated, induced in a coma, and I was completely paralyzed.”
He said he credited not only his family, but the Newsmax family, in his ongoing recovery.
Grimm remains in a wheelchair and is undergoing physical and occupational therapy while “working on getting the hands moving.”
“I lost a lot of dexterity in my fingers, but that’s what I’m working on, as well as getting the legs stimulated, building the muscle back up,” he said. “But I do feel a lot more sensation. When I first fell, I had no sensation in my legs at all. If you grabbed my foot, you grabbed my ankle. I would not feel it. Now I do feel it.”
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