Biden should have ‘immediately’ pardoned Trump, Sen. Mitt Romney says

Sen. Mitt Romney said President Biden could and should have pardoned former President Donald Trump and leaned hard on state prosecutors not to bring their cases to trial.

Mr. Romney, Utah Republican and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, said such a move would not only save the nation from the unedifying spectacles of the trials but would have benefited Mr. Biden politically.

“You may disagree with this, but had I been President Biden, when the Justice Department brought on indictments, I would have immediately pardoned him. I’d have pardoned President Trump,” he said in an interview on MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle.”

Mr. Romney said the New York hush-money trial is currently rallying Republicans around Mr. Trump and allowing him to play victim to his political benefit.

But a pardoning “makes me, President Biden, the big guy and the person I pardoned a little guy,” he added.

Presidents can only issue pardons in federal cases and only two of the four clusters of cases are federal crimes — accusations of election-overturn conspiracy charges in a District court and of mishandling documents in a Florida federal court.

The cases in Georgia and New York — respectively accusing him of conspiring to overturn that state’s election result and business fraud over sending hush money to a porn star — are state cases over which a president has no power.

Doesn’t matter, Mr. Romney said, citing the example of President Lyndon B. Johnson as an old-school man who could get things done.

“I have been around for a while. If LBJ had been president, and he didn’t want something like this to happen, he’d have been all over that prosecutor saying, ‘You better not bring that forward or I’m gonna drive you out of office,’” he said.

The one presidential pardon in U.S. history — of President Richard M. Nixon — was defended by the man who issued it, President Gerald Ford, as a magnanimous gesture to avoid putting the country through the trauma of a trial.

Ford also argued that the verdict of history and being forced from office was enough punishment of Nixon for Watergate.

Mr. Romney also is no MAGA lackey.

He voted to convict Mr. Trump in his both his impeachment trials and his vote in the first — over his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy - was the first ever cast by a U.S. senator to convict a president of his own party.