Republican front-runner and former President Donald Trump told NBC News on Thursday that it’s “very unlikely” he would pardon himself if he were to win the 2024 general election.
Trump made the comments in an excerpted interview with Kristen Welker, the new moderator of “Meet the Press.” The full interview will air Sunday, Welker’s first show.
Trump, facing four separate trials — two of them federal — maintained to Welker that he’s done nothing wrong in any of them.
“I think it’s very unlikely,” he told Welker about a self-pardon. “What, what did I do wrong? I didn’t do anything wrong. You mean because I challenge an election, they want to put me in jail?”
Trump declined to fully rule it out when Welker pressed, but he did bring up that he was encouraged to pardon himself at the end of his first term as president in 2021 but didn’t.
“People said, ‘Would you like to pardon yourself?’ I had a couple of attorneys that said, ‘You can do it if you want,'” Trump said. “I had some people that said, ‘It would look bad if you do it, because I think it would look terrible.’
“Let me just tell you. I said, ‘The last thing I’d ever do is give myself a pardon,'” he told Welker about his thinking in 2021.
Trump weighed in on the gun charges brought against Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, telling Welker there are two systems of justice — one for Biden and his family and one for Trump.
“There’s no question about it,” Trump said. “He had a plea deal that was the deal of the century. The art of the deal — you could write a book on it.”
Earlier Thursday, Trump weighed in on social media about the gun charges, posting “the gun charge is the only crime that does not implicate Hunter Biden. One down, Eleven to go!!”
Original Article: https://www.newsmax.com/politics/donald-trump-pardon-himself/2023/09/14/id/1134565/