Former Vice President Joe Biden sat down with Radio Iowa this week and answered a question I haven’t heard him address before.
During an interview with Radio Iowa later Sunday afternoon, Biden said if he is elected, he will not follow President Ford’s example in pardoning Nixon so Nixon was not prosecuted for his role in Watergate.
“It wouldn’t unite the country,” Biden said. “You’d say: ‘Wait a minute. I get a parking ticket and I’ve got to pay it. This happens to me and I’ve got to go to jail. This guy does all these things that put us jeopardy and he gets off? I think this is of a different nature. And I think President Ford, God love him, he’s a good guy, I knew him pretty well. I think if he had to do it over again, he wouldn’t have done it … because he didn’t get re-elected.”
As regular readers know, I’ve been keeping an eye on this for a while, because for Donald Trump, winning a second term next year is about more than just power and ego; it’s also about the statute of limitations.
After all, the president has been implicated in a variety of alleged crimes, though Trump appears to be shielded from prosecution so long as he’s in office. If he were to lose in 2020, that shield would disappear, and the prospect of an indictment would become quite real. Indeed, by most accounts, the only way for Trump to ensure he faces no criminal liability is for him to remain president for another four years.
But let’s say he doesn’t. For the sake of conversation, let’s imagine Trump not only loses the popular vote again, but also comes up short in the electoral college. Let’s also say it’s 2021 and the president’s Democratic successor, recognizing the possibility of Trump facing an indictment, has to decide whether to pull a Gerald Ford and issue a pardon for his/her scandal-plagued predecessor.
Biden is now committed to not pardoning Trump, and the Delaware Democrat isn’t alone.
In late February, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) got the ball rolling in a blog post published to Medium. “[L]et me be perfectly clear, in the way that everyone who might be President next should be: If I’m elected President of the United States, there will be no pardons for anyone implicated in these investigations. Everyone who might succeed Donald Trump as president should adopt the same policy.”
Two weeks later, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews sat down with Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and brought up Ford’s 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon. “Would you consider pardoning Trump if you took the presidency?” the host asked.
Booker didn’t hesitate. “No,” the senator said.
In May, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) was asked if he’d be willing to pardon Trump. “Uh, no,” the governor replied. “I would not.”
Circling back to our earlier coverage, as 2020 issues go, this one is inherently speculative. No one can say with confidence whether a prosecutor would even want to try to indict Trump after he leaves office.
It’s far easier to say, however, that the Republican’s criminal liability is real, and if a Democrat wins the presidency next year, he or she will have to at least consider the possibility of seeing his or her predecessor face criminal charges.
Don’t be surprised if every Democratic candidate goes on the record on this issue in the coming weeks and months.
Postscript: I’ve highlighted the comments from Biden, Booker, Bullock, and Warren because they crossed my radar, but it’s entirely possible that other Democratic candidates have weighed in. If campaign aides for the other Democratic candidates see this post, and they want me to update it with additional statements, I’m happy to do so.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."