Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump received support from an unlikely person this week — outgoing Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah.
Romney, who isn’t running for reelection in November, said this week that President Joe Biden made a big mistake when he chose not to pardon Trump.
The comments may be seen as odd at first, considering Romney was one of only seven Republican senators to vote to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial in 2021.
But, it seems as though Romney’s comments were more about criticizing what Biden should have done to improve his position, rather than as actual support for Trump.
Appearing on MSNBC this week, Romney said of Biden:
“He should have fought like crazy to keep this prosecution from going forward. It was a win-win for Donald Trump.”
Biden couldn’t have stopped all the criminal cases that Trump is facing, since a president only has the power to pardon someone for federal crimes. That means Biden had no power to stop the state-level cases Trump is facing — one in Georgia over election interference and the hush-money trial that’s taking place now in New York.
At the same time, Romney said that Biden “made an enormous error” by not trying to pressure prosecutors in New York to drop their case against the former president.
What the Utah senator said was that Biden let a golden opportunity pass him by — that he could’ve unified the entire country behind him.
As he said:
“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. Why? Well, because it makes me, President Biden, the big guy and the person I pardoned a little guy.”
Such a move has actually been used in the past, as Romney pointed out. He said:
“I have been around for a while. If LBJ (Lyndon B. Johnson )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 going to drive you out of office.’”
The situation is eerily similar one that happened in the 1970s. President Richard Nixon resigned from office that year after the Watergate scandal came to light, and he faced possible criminal charges as a result.
His vice president at the time, Gerald Ford, assumed the role of presidency and pardoned Nixon one month later. What that did was remove all the potential distractions that a potential criminal case against a former president would have brought, and allowed Ford to run the country as he saw fit.
While Ford didn’t win reelection in 1976, losing to Democrat Jimmy Carter, he only lost by a small margin — something that may not have happened if Nixon’s stain remained throughout the campaign.
Today, Biden is having to deal with all the attention that is being paid to Trump as he faces these criminal trials. And as some people say, no publicity is bad publicity.
