NEW YORK POST
Retiring President Biden stunned listeners Tuesday by saying his predecessor Donald Trump should be locked up — 14 days before the presidential election in which Trump is the Republican nominee.
“If I said this five years ago, you’d lock me up: We gotta lock him up,” Biden, 81, said during a visit to a Democratic campaign office in Concord, NH, the Granite State’s capital.
After a four-second pause during which his audience enthusiastically applauded, Biden added in an apparent backtrack attempt: “politically, lock him up — lock him out, that’s what we’ve got to do.”
The Trump campaign quickly hit back, accusing Biden of making a Freudian slip.
“Joe Biden just admitted the truth: he and Kamala’s plan all along has been to politically persecute their opponent President Trump because they can’t beat him fair and square,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
“The Harris-Biden Admin is the real threat to democracy. We call on Kamala Harris to condemn Joe Biden’s disgraceful remark.”
A person close to Biden, who often misspeaks in public, told The Post that the president’s follow-up comment meant that he hadn’t intended to call for Trump to be incarcerated.
However, the president and his aides typically refrain from commenting at all on the four pending criminal cases against Trump, who contends that a quartet of local and federal indictments last year were politically motivated to aid Biden’s then-re-election campaign.
Biden has tauntingly referenced Trump’s legal woes before, however, saying last week that “I think he’s running to stay out of jail” during an appearance in Pennsylvania.
Trump, 78, was convicted in May by a Manhattan jury of 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign.
