Joe Biden said he would not pardon President Trump if he is elected to the White House in the fall.
The presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee was asked late Thursday whether he would diverge from former President Gerald Ford and commit not to absolve Trump of any wrongdoing in a bid to heal the nation such as Ford did for President Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal.
“Absolutely, yes, I commit,” Biden told MSNBC.
Though the question didn’t reference a particular investigation, the two-term vice president and Delaware’s 36-year senator promised never to interfere in any Justice Department cases.
“It’s hands off completely. The attorney general is not the president’s lawyer. It’s the people’s lawyer,” he said. “We never saw anything like the prostitution of that office like we see it today. It is not something the president is entitled to do: to direct either a prosecution and or decide to drop a case.”
Trump’s Justice Department last week announced it intended to drop its case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn, after which Attorney General William Barr received a torrent of criticism from Democrats and some law enforcement veterans concerned about political influence. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in 2017 about his contacts with Russian diplomats during the White House transition, but now claims he’s innocent and was entrapped by the government after previously concealed documents were made public.
Biden on Thursday also sought to clarify comments he made this week about what he knew about the Obama administration’s look at the foreign dealings of the incoming Trump administration.
“I was never a part or had any knowledge of any criminal investigation into Flynn when I was in office. Period. Not one single time,” he said. He did not say if he was aware of any counterintelligence investigation into Flynn.
On Tuesday he told ABC that he “was aware that there was, that they asked for an investigation, but that’s all I know about it” when pressed on his presence at a Jan. 5, 2017, meeting where he and President Barack Obama “were briefed” on the FBI’s plan to interview Flynn about his intercepted conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
