Former President Donald Trump came as close as he ever has to outright saying he would try to get President Joe Biden thrown in prison if he wins another term in office, in an interview released on Tuesday by TIME Magazine.
During the interview, Trump gave seemingly contradictory answers when asked about jailing Biden, although he did say he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate him.
"I wouldn’t want to hurt Biden," Trump said initially. "I have too much respect for the office."
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The former president then shifted gears and vowed Biden would face charges if the Supreme Court didn't grant his demands for total immunity to break the law as president.
"If they said that a President doesn’t get immunity, then Biden, I am sure, will be prosecuted for all of his crimes," Trump explained.
READ MORE: How Trump could run for president from jail
The Supreme Court ruling in question is set to come down after oral arguments in which the justices broadly appeared skeptical of the idea presidents enjoy universal immunity for anything done in office, but at least some appeared open to excluding some "official acts" from prosecution.
Biden has not been charged with any criminal offense. For months now, House Republicans have been running an impeachment investigation, looking for evidence that Biden took international bribes when he was serving as vice president, but have failed to unearth any compelling evidence of this and are quietly acknowledging the investigation is going nowhere.
Trump, however, is no stranger to casually demanding his opponents' imprisonment, going all the way back to when he whipped his supporters into chants of "Lock Her Up" against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, over her use of a personal server for government business which may have inadvertently retained some classified information. She was never found to have broken any law, although ironically, Trump himself is now being prosecuted for the unlawful retention of boxes of highly classified national defense information concealed at Mar-a-Lago.
More recently, in 2019, Trump found himself impeached over a scheme in which he tried to extort the president of Ukraine into announcing a criminal investigation into the Biden family, although he was not convicted in the Senate.
