Former Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) mentioned on Monday he tried to get the Biden administration to subject a preemptive pardon to President Trump in the course of the investigation into Trump’s efforts to remain in energy after shedding the 2020 election.
“I called a member of the White House, one of the senior advisers to President Biden. And I said, ‘If the Justice Department decides to indict President Trump, I hope President Biden will immediately eliminate that, and that he will provide a pardon immediately,’” Romney, a former GOP presidential nominee and Massachusetts governor, advised CNN’s Dana Bash at an occasion at Drew College in New Jersey.
Romney mentioned he feared the opportunity of prosecuting political opponents.
“Why?” Romney continued. “Number one, I don’t want the anger and the hate and the vitriol. But, number two, we just can’t begin to be prosecuting political opponents.”
“Pardoning at that point would have been a way to make that very clear,” he added.
Requested what the White Home mentioned in response, Romney smiled and mentioned, “They didn’t do that.”
Romney at instances spoke out in opposition to Trump throughout his first time period and have become the one Republican to vote to convict him in each his impeachment trials, together with within the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Throughout the dialogue on Monday, he mentioned he disagrees with the Trump Justice Division’s choice to indict former FBI Director James Comey, who faces prices of constructing a false assertion in addition to one other for obstruction of a congressional continuing in connection to testimony he gave earlier than the Senate in 2020.
“The idea that the system of justice is used to punish political opponents is a very dangerous path to go down,” Romney mentioned.
“I just don’t think that’s the right path to go down,” he added. “I’d go down a different path.”
Trump has lengthy known as for prices in opposition to Comey, whom he blames for the investigation into his marketing campaign’s ties to Russia within the 2016 election — one thing he has deemed a “witch hunt.” The weekend forward of the indictment, Trump appeared to explicitly strain his lawyer basic to pursue a case in opposition to Comey and others.
Romney speculated that the president’s previous embarrassment may very well be driving his name to prosecute his enemies.
“The most powerful negative emotion is humiliation. If you’ve been humiliated, the response is the most significant,” Romney mentioned.
“And I think President Trump, when he was not in office, was humiliated by these actions where he sat in a New York courtroom at the defendant table being chastised by a judge and being attacked by a prosecutor who in his campaign and said he was gonna bring Donald Trump an indictment and put him on trial.”
