Former President Bill Clinton told The View on Wednesday that even though his wife, Hillary Clinton, “didn’t do anything wrong,” he’d be open to discussing a “preemptive pardon” for her with President Joe Biden.
“Do you think it would be wise of President Biden to preemptively pardon any potential targets? What about your wife, Hillary Clinton?” co-host Sunny Hostin asked. “She apparently is on Kash Patel’s list.”
President-elect Donald Trump recently nominated Kash Patel to be his director of the FBI. In Patel’s book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, he wrote a list of the “Executive Branch Deep State” in his appendix that included FBI Director Christopher Wray, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, President Joe Biden, former FBI Director James Comey, and former Obama administration Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“They’ve got a problem with her because first, she didn’t do anything wrong,” Bill Clinton responded to Hostin’s question. “Second, she followed the rules exactly as they were written. Third, Trump’s State Department — Trump’s State Department — found — remember how the emails were such a big issue in 2016? Trump’s State Department found that Hillary sent and received exactly zero classified emails on her personal device. It was a made-up phony story.”
“So, you know, I guess if Kash Patel is determined to make one up, he could do it, but I think if President Biden wanted to talk to me about that, I will talk to him about it, but I don’t think I should be giving public advice on the pardon power,” the former president said.
He continued, “I think it’s too — it’s a very personal thing, but it is — I hope [Trump] won’t do that. Trump, you know, most of us get out of this world ahead of where we’d get if all we got was simple justice. And so it’s normally a fool’s ear and to spend a lot of time trying to get even.”
Co-host Joy Behar asked whether a pardon would “signal” that his wife and others “had actually done something wrong.”
“Not necessarily,” the former president said.
He went on to praise his wife’s “well-qualified” credentials. Bill Clinton admitted that he thought Trump won the 2024 election “fair and square” but hinted that former FBI Director James Comey’s investigation into his wife’s emails shortly before the election may have interfered “last minute” with her chances in the 2016 election.
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“I also think it’s important for everybody to just take a deep breath and say that, unlike in 2016, there was no outside influence, like the FBI director interfering at the last moment in violation of 70 years of policy and then change 5% overnight,” he said.
Bill Clinton said this year’s election showed that there were “a lot of reasons why” Trump won in November. The former president said that he currently sleeps well at night because he “did everything” possible to help Harris win despite her defeat.
