Just in case you were wondering, if Joe Biden is elected president in November he will not pardon President Trump. He promises he will not do that. What he doesn’t say is for what charge(s) Trump would request a pardon.

It’s a comment Joe Biden made during Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show, The Last Word Thursday when a voter asked him if he would pardon Trump “under the pretense of healing the nation.” He doesn’t want Biden to “pull a Gerald Ford”, you see. So Biden, who is running under the pretense that he wants to unify the country, said no, he will not pardon Trump. He also promised not to get in the way of investigations and try to stop them.

Biden seems incapable of understanding the irony in his comments when he says these things to pander to far-left audiences. He doesn’t do interviews with FNC, for example, except the Sunday show with Chris Wallace back in February. He called Wallace “Chuck” when he mixed Chris Wallace up with Chuck Todd and hasn’t been back since. Biden likes to say he’ll get a lot of disaffected Republican voters in the presidential election yet he doesn’t do much in the way of outreach to them. His campaign is making sure that good old Joe is playing it safe, especially while he’s hunkered down in his basement in Delaware.

It isn’t surprising that Biden promised to continue to be a divisive force in politics. He also promised not to pardon Trump in October 2019 during a press conference in Iowa, five days after he called for Trump’s impeachment for the first time. At the time the focus was on the claims that Trump colluded with Russia to win the election in 2016, now discredited.

“It wouldn’t unite the country,” Biden said. “You’d say: ‘Wait a minute. I get a parking ticket and I’ve got to pay it. This happens to me and I’ve got to go to jail. This guy does all these things that put us jeopardy and he gets off? I think this is of a different nature. And I think President Ford, God love him he’s a good guy, I knew him pretty well, I think if he had to do it over again he wouldn’t have done it…because he didn’t get re-elected.”

Biden calls Ford “a good guy” but then goes on to say that good guy wouldn’t act in the same way if he had to do it all over again because he lost his bid for re-election. The fact is that Ford made that agreement with Senate Republicans during the Nixon impeachment days when Republicans decided to ask Nixon to go ahead and resign instead of facing an impeachment trial in the Senate. The idea was to get Nixon out of Washington and soothe Republicans with a promise that Nixon would be allowed to go back to California and live out his life quietly, as he did. Ford, a long time member of the swamp (including Speaker of the House), knew the country must be healed after the trauma and rose to the occasion. Joe Biden is not a man of such character and incapable of looking at a pardon in that light. Biden sees such decisions in a completely personal way.

Biden told O’Donnell that “the president must allow the Justice Department to operate without interference.” This was a slap at the Department of Justice under the leadership of Attorney General Barr. He said he wouldn’t stop any investigations that might happen to Trump associates. “It is not something the president is entitled to do, to direct a prosecution or decide to drop a case,” Biden said Thursday on MSNBC. “It’s a dereliction of duty.”

This also isn’t the first time he has called out the DOJ during the campaign. Also during the October press conference in Iowa, he said the reason Trump was going through impeachment was because of him and his son. At the time he was promising to bring the White House back to the “squeaky clean environment” of the Obama administration. He also said he wouldn’t let reporters change the subject away from Trump and on to his family.

“No one in my family will have an office in the White House, will sit in on meetings as if they’re a cabinet, will in fact have any a business relationship with anyone that relates to a foreign corporation or to a foreign country,” Biden said.

Biden’s comments came during a Sunday afternoon news conference in Iowa. His son’s attorney issued a public statement early Sunday morning saying Hunter Biden will resign from a Chinese company and will not take any foreign work if his father is elected president.

President Trump’s request that Ukraine’s president initiate an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine is at the center of an impeachment inquiry. The former vice president, in speaking with reporters, said no news operation “of any consequence” that has examined the record has found he or his son did anything illegal.

So much for the squeaky clean Obama administration now, amirite? It was a ridiculous statement in the first place, of course, for any of us who witnessed the corruption within the Obama-Biden administration. Obamagate, as President Trump calls it, certainly shows deep levels of corruption in the last administration. There are plenty of other areas that showed corruption, too, besides those we now know were rampant within the intelligence community. Whether it was the outright lies about Obamacare, or weaponizing the Internal Revenue Service against Tea Partiers, or Valerie Jarrett asking social media users to narc on Obamacare opponents, or Attorney General Holder proudly calling himself Obama’s “wingman”, or pandering to Latino voters with DACA, the examples of a swampy, corrupt administration go on and on and are there for anyone to see. No one got out of the Obama administration smelling like a rose once a little bit of reporting began.

No doubt Quid Pro Joe is expecting the press to give him a free ride, as they did for Barack Obama. Joe should be soaring in the polls, given the economic crisis and the pandemic, but he’s not. Americans aren’t ready to toss out Trump and unfairly blame him for the current crisis or for the woes of the world. The political world has changed with the Trump era and Biden is a return to the past. The same old malarkey about how pure and clean he is – just a humble man of the people – doesn’t cut it anymore.