WASHINGTON — President Trump accused former President Joe Biden of corruption Wednesday and hinted that he may be prosecuted.
“It’s really hard to say that they shouldn’t have to go through it all,” Trump said in his first TV interview since returning to the White House.
Trump, 78, said that Biden, 82, received “very bad advice” to pardon five relatives — but not himself — minutes before leaving office Monday to head off inquiries into the family’s business dealings.
“You know what the funny thing — maybe the sad thing — is? He didn’t give himself a pardon,” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
“And if you look at it, it all had to do with him — I mean, the money went to him,” he added.
Biden pardoned all three of his siblings — including his brother James Biden — and two of their spouses after first pardoning his son Hunter, 54, on Dec. 1 as he awaited sentencing on gun and tax crimes.
“I went through four years of hell by this scum that we had to deal with,” Trump said, referring to four criminal cases he faced as he campaigned against Biden and ultimately against former Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I spent millions of dollars in legal fees, and I won, but I did it the hard way. It’s really hard to say that they shouldn’t have to go through it all. So it’s very hard to say that.”
“Remember this,” Trump went on. “Joe Biden got very bad advice… Joe Biden has very bad advisors. Somebody advised Joe Biden to give pardons to everybody but him.”
At one point in the interview, Hannity asked Trump if he had “ordered the DOJ” to investigate the former president.
“Look, he didn’t give himself a pardon, and he didn’t give some other people a pardon that needed it,” Trump replied, without directly answering the question.
Biden said in his final days in office that he wouldn’t pardon himself because “I didn’t do anything wrong,” though he had said the same of his family members.
“The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that they engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense,” his Monday statement announcing the eleventh-hour pardons read.
For years, James Biden, 75, leveraged his brother’s powerful roles as a senator and then vice president to lure in domestic and international business — in many cases partnering with Joe’s son Hunter.
It’s unclear what possible crimes by Joe Biden would be investigated by the Trump Justice Department, and some theoretical offenses, such as infractions under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, have a five-year statute of limitations and would not be chargeable.
It’s rare for a former president to face a criminal investigation or charges — however, Biden’s Justice Department in 2023 indicted Trump in a pair of cases after his first term for allegedly mishandling classified documents and for challenging the results of the 2020 election.
Biden, like Trump, was investigated for mishandling classified documents — with files from his vice presidency and Senate tenure found at his Delaware home and a DC office. Special counsel Robert Hur declined to prosecute him last year, citing a jury’s likely perception of an “elderly man with poor memory.”
It’s unclear if Hur’s decision could be revisited, or if any possible criminal charges could stem from Biden’s role in his family’s dealings.
The Democrat’s pardons of his family members granted sweeping reprieves for conduct dating to 2014 — and some crimes do have 10-year statutes of limitation that conceivably could be in play. For example, wire fraud can have a decade-long deadline for criminal charges.
Joe Biden met with his relatives’ business associates from two Chinese-government linked ventures and with associates from Kazakhstan, Mexico, Russia and Ukraine, according to witness testimony, emails and even photographs.
Despite the evidence, he repeatedly denied those contacts, which were the subject of a Republican-led impeachment inquiry abandoned shortly after Biden ended his campaign for re-election in July.
Trump cited documents from Hunter’s abandoned laptop to question whether Joe Biden was a “corrupt politician” at the final debate of the 2020 election.
Laptop records showed that Joe dined as vice president with an executive of a Ukrainian gas company paying his son $1 million a year and that he was penciled in for a 10% cut of a joint venture with a Chinese energy company that paid Hunter and James millions.
Later disclosures revealed that Hunter threatened his father’s wrath in a July 2017 text message to a Chinese associate if an agreed-upon deal wasn’t fulfilled — and that within 10 days $5.1 million flowed from the entity to bank accounts associated with Hunter and James Biden.
Biden’s Justice Department was accused by a pair of IRS whistleblowers of orchestrating a wide-reaching coverup of a tax fraud investigation of Hunter Biden, including heading off the pursuit of leads implicating the president.
Congressional Republicans also subpoenaed bank records showing that James Biden transferred $240,000 to his elder brother — that James said were personal loan repayments. The GOP-led House Oversight Committee said the flow of funds showed that $40,000 came from China.
