MANCHESTER, N.H. — Julian Castro has a message for President Trump.
The White House hopeful, at his first campaign stop in New Hampshire since declaring his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, said that if he’s elected, Trump shouldn’t expect a pardon for any possible misdeeds that could come to light in coming months.
“I think that the next president is going to … make a decision like this about the president because one of those investigations, whether it’s the Mueller investigation or it’s in the Southern District of New York, is going to present the issue of punishment. That’s what I believe,” Castro said Tuesday night at a jam-packed tea café in this small city near the Maine border.
The comments, from one of several longshot candidates entering what is likely to be a historically crowded field, highlight how the Russia probe and the prospect of Democrats someday delivering Trump’s comeuppance – whether in the form of impeachment or, in Castro’s case, the denial of a pardon – have factored into their campaigns, first in the midterms and now heading into 2020.
Castro, in his pardon remarks, was entertaining a scenario posed to him by a Democratic activist who asked whether he would use President Gerald Ford’s pardon of former President Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s as a guide – in the event he is president and Trump is facing charges. Ford was criticized at the time, though many Americans felt he made the right move in helping the country move past the crisis.
“I would not be inclined to issue a pardon, because I don’t think that anybody should be above the law,” Castro, the former San Antonio mayor who later served as housing secretary under President Barack Obama, said to cheers and applause from the Democratic activists gathered at the café.- READ MORE