Buttigieg says he's president, so be it if Trump is sued after leaving office

In an interview with Chuck Todd, moderator of "Meet the Press," Pete Buttigieg said that when he was elected president, he would have no problem with President Donald Trump being prosecuted after leaving his post.

In an interview for Sunday, Buttigieg said he wanted to focus "on improving the lives of people" when he was elected president, but that justice would also be done.

"America can do a lot of things at the same time, but it's not the job of the president" to sue a former president, Buttigieg said.

Watch over Chuck Todd's interview with Pete Buttigieg on Meet the Press on NBC Sunday morning.

The spring report of former special advocate Robert Mueller on Russian influence during the 2016 presidential election detailed many occasions in which Trump could have hindered justice. Democrats in the House are afterwards wondering whether or not to seriously initiate a procedure of impeachment.

"If, at the same time, investigations were being conducted into the criminal behavior of people who were once at the highest levels of our government, so be it," said Buttigieg, presidential candidate for the Democratic Party of 2020.

Buttigieg said during the interview that Trump had not respected the role of the Department of Justice as an independent law enforcement agency.

"He treated it as if it were to be his own law firm," he said.

Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, in Indiana, said that prosecuting Trump would not be a litmus test for his choice of Attorney General when he won the elections.

"Politicians should not make decisions in this direction," he said.

"What I would say is that any Attorney General I would appoint would be someone who would faithfully apply the concept that no one is above the law," he added. "Everyone should be held responsible."

"Justice is blind," he said. "And I will appoint a public prosecutor and, in this case, judges and judges who will defend this principle."

Buttigieg said at a public meeting of MSNBC on June 3 that he would vote to dismiss the president if he was a member of Congress and if the vote was going on. Trump, he said at the time, "deserves to be removed".