Former US President Joe Biden has unleashed a barrage of criticism on President Donald Trump in a soon-to-be released memoir, saying he believes the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021 “should follow him to his grave”.
In an excerpt published in The Atlantic on Monday, Biden also said Trump should not have pardoned supporters who stormed Congress in a bid to thwart the certification of Biden’s election victory.
“The criminals who attacked law-enforcement officers that day didn’t deserve pardons,” the former president wrote. “They deserved prison terms.”
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis called Biden “the worst president in American history” in response to the BBC’s request for comment.
In the excerpt of the book, which is due to be released later this month, Biden assailed Trump and his administration for pushing to “tear down institutions and inflame hatreds”.
Biden accused him of turning a “blind eye” to their violent acts, writing: “You don’t get to turn a blind eye to cops being punched, speared, sprayed, and brutalised and call yourself a friend of law enforcement.”
“What Trump did on January 6, 2021, should never be forgotten. It should follow him to his grave,” he said.
Trump has previously denied any wrongdoing in connection with the riot, which happened after he held a rally.
Upon returning to the White House last year, he pardoned more than 1,000 people convicted for their role in them and commuted the sentences of a dozen members of far-right groups the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Trump defended these pardons, saying “these people have been destroyed”.
Bis, the White House spokesperson, said on Monday that what Biden and his administration “did to this country should never be forgotten”.
She asserted they “created the worst border crisis in history, were soft-on-crime, produced the worst inflation crisis in 40 years, and championed America-Last policies”.
The excerpt of Biden’s memoir also detailed a long meeting between himself and Trump following the latter’s 2024 election victory.
Biden wrote that he was shocked when Trump purportedly said: “if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends”.
The former president said the statement left him “too stunned to respond”.
“He said my performance on job creation had been ‘extraordinary,'” Biden wrote. “He added that he’d been relieved he didn’t have to run against me. I didn’t really understand why he was buttering me up, so I cut off his compliments to move on to the business at hand.”
Biden’s memoir comes on the back of Democrats’ success in midterm elections last week.
He was not seen much on the campaign trail as he has continued treatment for prostate cancer and has said he is limiting a promotional tour for his book because of this treatment.
“Some days are better than others,” Biden said in a social media post on Sunday about his cancer experience. “It hasn’t stopped me. But sometimes it slows me down.”
By BBC News
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