5 hours Ago By The Daily Beast
President backpedaled Tuesday after taking a page from his onetime political rival’s playbook, telling a crowd of Democrats of former President , “We’ve got to lock him up,” before quickly clarifying that he didn’t mean it literally. Rattling off the dangers of a potential second Trump presidency while speaking at a New Hampshire campaign office, Biden added, “I know this sounds bizarre. It sounds like, if I said this five years ago, you’d lock me up.
We’ve got to lock him up.” The audience burst into applause, and the president appeared to catch himself. “Politically lock him up,” he said.
“Lock him out. That’s what we have to do.” Biden in NH lists what Trump would do as president and says: “we gotta lock him up” and then, appearing to realize how his comments would be taken, adds: “politically, lock him up.
” — Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) Biden, who has faced accusations from Trump and his allies that he is actively seeking the prosecution of the former president, has typically refrained from the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that Trump favors, including calls for his political enemies to be arrested and jailed. The “lock her up” chant originated during his 2016 presidential campaign in reference to his then-opponent . The Trump campaign was predictably quick to leap on Biden’s Tuesday remark.
“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,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “The Harris-Biden Admin is the real threat to democracy. We call on to condemn Joe Biden’s disgraceful remark.
” Vice President Kamala Harris has discouraged her supporters from chanting “lock him up” at her rallies. At , she told the crowd, “Hold on. You know what? The courts are going to handle that part of it.
What we’re going to do is beat him in November.” Trump encouraged his supporters’ anti-Clinton chants in 2016, frequently smiling and nodding along. More than along the campaign trail, he himself suggested that the former secretary of state should be imprisoned, often referring to her as “Crooked Hillary.
” That’s not how he remembers it today, however. In an interview this summer with Fox News, Trump denied that he’d ever called for Clinton to be jailed. “Hillary Clinton, I didn’t say, ‘Lock her up,’ but the people would all say, ‘Lock her up.
Lock her up,’” he explained, adding that her imprisonment would have been “a terrible thing.” The calls for Clinton to be “locked up” came primarily from her use of a private email address for matters related to her official work with the State Department. She was investigated by the FBI over the matter but never charged, with investigators saying that she had been “extremely careless” but had not acted with criminal intent.
Trump, on the other hand, is facing charges in three outstanding criminal cases, and was convicted of 34 felonies in a fourth earlier this year. He will be sentenced in that case, which involves his falsification of business records, in late November, about three weeks after Election Day..
