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.”
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.