Former Vice President Joe Biden would not pardon President Donald Trump if he's elected to the White House because "it wouldn't unite the country," as former President Gerald Ford reasoned in 1974 for absolving Richard Nixon for his Watergate crimes.
"It wouldn't unite the country," Biden told Radio Iowa on Sunday. "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," Biden continued. "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."
Ford granted Nixon a "full, free, and absolute pardon" on Sept. 8, 1974, and he lost the 1976 election to Democrat Jimmy Carter.
President Trump is under investigation by the House for possible impeachment regarding a July telephone call with the Ukrainian president and whether he suggested an investigation of Biden and his son Hunter.
Other 2020 Democratic candidates have voiced similar opinions on any Trump pardon, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.
Warren wrote on Medium.com in a February post: "[L]et me be perfectly clear, in the way that everyone who might be president next should be: If I'm elected president of the United States, there will be no pardons for anyone implicated in these investigations.
"Everyone who might succeed Donald Trump as president should adopt the same policy."