Outgoing President Biden surprised his audience Tuesday by calling for the jailing of his predecessor, Donald Trump, 14 days before the presidential election in which Trump will be the Republican nominee.
“If you said this five years ago, you would have locked me up. We have to lock him up.” Mr. Biden, 81, said: During a visit to the New Hampshire Democratic Party election office.
After four seconds of silence as the audience erupted into rapturous applause, Biden added: “Politically… shut him out. That's what we have to do.”
The president and his aides typically refrain from commenting on the four pending criminal cases against him, but Trump said the four local and federal indictments last year were a political move to support then-Biden's re-election campaign. He claims that he had a motive.
Trump, 78, was found guilty by a Manhattan jury in May of 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records to conceal a 2016 hush-money payment. The verdict in the case was handed down by Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg and is scheduled to be handed down on November 26th.
Trump faces pending federal and state charges in Georgia related to his challenge to his loss to Biden in the 2020 election. And federal prosecutors are retrying a separate case accusing Trump of mishandling classified records that a judge dismissed in July.
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