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.
The 45th president’s sentencing in that case, which was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, is scheduled for Nov. 26.
Trump also faces pending federal and state charges in Georgia related to challenging his 2020 election defeat by Biden. And federal prosecutors are attempting to revive another case out of South Florida accusing Trump of mishandling classified records, which a judge dismissed in July.
If Trump becomes the 47th president on Nov. 5, the new administration’s Justice Department leaders likely would seek to set aside the two federal cases.
Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, are in a close contest according to swing-state polling — with RealClearPolitics averages showing Trump marginally ahead across the board, but within survey margins of error.
Harris, 60, usually treads carefully when discussing whether Trump should be jailed — often telling supporters who chant “lock him up!” at her rallies that the court system will make that decision.
Additional reporting by Ryan King
