Former President Bill Clinton said on Wednesday that he is open to talking with President Joe Biden about possibly preemptively pardoning his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Clinton shared his thoughts while he visited “The View” on Wednesday, focusing on President-elect Donald Trump’s threats to go after political enemies during his second term.
Host Sunny Hostin asked the former president if he thought Biden should issue preemptive pardons, to which Clinton replied that he thinks they would have a conversation about it if he were considering it.
“I think if President Biden wanted to talk to me about that, I will talk to him about it, but I don’t think I should be giving public advice on the pardon power,” Clinton said. “It’s a very personal thing, but … I hope [Trump] won’t do that.”
During his 2016 campaign for office, Trump often threw out the phrase “lock her up,” referring to his plan to prosecute Hillary Clinton over her handling of the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, specifically her government emails being sent to a private server.
Trump famously took a dig at Clinton during a town hall debate in 2016 when she said it was a good thing men like him weren’t in office. Trump responded with “Because you’d be in jail,” sparking a huge response from the crowd and creating a clip that continues to circulate.
Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016, but the president-elect never went after Clinton, as he promised on the campaign trail, leaving many wondering if the threats this time around are real or just more political rhetoric being used.
Still, the former president insists that Trump and his allies have held a grudge against his wife despite her doing nothing wrong.
“They’ve got a problem with her because first, she didn’t do anything wrong. Second, she followed the rules exactly as they were written. Third… remember how the emails were such a big issue in 2016? Trump’s State Department found that Hillary sent and received exactly zero classified emails on her personal device. It was a made-up phone story,” Clinton said.