Biden Pardon Bombshell — Is He Suddenly Fair Game?
A newly disclosed account from Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has reopened one of the most politically charged questions left over from the 2024 presidential campaign: whether President Joe Biden ever considered using his clemency power to end federal criminal cases against Donald Trump before voters decided their rematch.
According to Cox, the answer is yes. In an episode described in his forthcoming book and reported by The Atlantic, the Republican governor said he urged Biden on Aug. 9, 2023, to pardon Trump as the two men rode together in the presidential limousine in Salt Lake City. Cox said he viewed a pardon not as a judgment that Trump was innocent, but as an extraordinary attempt to interrupt what he feared was becoming a cycle of prosecution, retaliation and escalating political contempt.
Cox said Biden surprised him by replying that he had already been thinking about the idea. According to the governor's account, Biden said he and first lady Jill Biden had discussed a possible Trump pardon that same week and that he would seriously consider it. No pardon was ever issued.
The disclosure, published in late August 2026, immediately became political ammunition for the current Trump White House. Spokeswoman Lauren Bis told the Daily Mail that the episode showed Biden knew Democrats had 'weaponized' the justice system against Trump and failed to stop it. The administration's interpretation fits a claim Trump and his allies have made for years: that the federal prosecutions brought during Biden's presidency were politically motivated efforts to damage his principal electoral opponent.
Cox's story is significant because it offers a rare glimpse into Biden's private thinking at a moment when Trump was facing unprecedented criminal exposure. But the account does not, by itself, establish that Biden ordered, directed or controlled the prosecutions. It shows that Biden considered an act of presidential clemency. Those are different propositions, and the distinction is central to understanding what the new disclosure proves - and what it does not.
The timing of the conversation is important. By Aug. 9, 2023, Trump had already been indicted in Manhattan on state charges involving the falsification of business records, indicted federally in Florida over his handling of classified documents and alleged obstruction, and indicted federally in Washington over alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Five days later, on Aug. 14, a Georgia grand jury would indict Trump and several allies in a separate state election-interference case.
A president's pardon power, however, reaches only federal offenses. Article II of the Constitution authorizes the president to grant pardons for 'Offences against the United States.' It does not allow a president to erase state criminal charges. Even if Biden had accepted Cox's proposal in its broadest practical form, he could have used clemency against the two federal cases but not the Manhattan prosecution or the later Georgia case.
That legal limitation complicates any suggestion that a single pardon would have ended Trump's entire criminal predicament. At most, Biden could have terminated or neutralized federal exposure for eligible conduct. State prosecutors in New York and Georgia operate under state authority and are not subject to a presidential pardon.
The federal cases were also formally placed under a special counsel rather than managed as ordinary White House matters. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith on Nov. 18, 2022, after Trump announced another presidential campaign and Biden had signaled an intention to seek reelection. Garland said the appointment was intended to reinforce Justice Department independence and accountability in an extraordinarily sensitive situation.
Smith said when he took the job that he would exercise independent judgment and follow the facts and law. His office later obtained grand-jury indictments in the classified-documents case and the federal election case. Those indictments were allegations, not findings of guilt, and Trump pleaded not guilty while repeatedly describing the cases as political persecution.
The existence of a special counsel did not make the Justice Department institutionally independent of the executive branch; the attorney general remained the department's leader. But the structure was specifically created to place day-to-day investigative and prosecutorial decisions at a greater distance from the White House. Public records have not established that Biden instructed Smith to indict Trump or dictated the charges brought by federal grand juries.
That is why the current White House's conclusion goes beyond the evidence contained in Cox's anecdote. A president may consider a pardon for reasons unrelated to a belief that a prosecution is corrupt. American presidents have used clemency to promote reconciliation, resolve divisive national controversies, reduce punishment they considered excessive or spare individuals from the burdens of prosecution even when they did not claim the underlying investigation was illegitimate.
The closest historical comparison is Gerald Ford's 1974 pardon of former President Richard Nixon. Ford said the country needed to move beyond Watergate and that a prolonged criminal process against a former president could deepen national division. The pardon did not prove that federal investigators had acted improperly. It represented Ford's political and constitutional judgment that clemency served the public interest.
Cox's stated reasoning in 2023 followed a similar logic. He was not a Trump loyalist at the time and had never voted for him. He feared that prosecuting a former president who was again seeking the White House would intensify partisan retaliation and make political violence or institutional breakdown more likely. His proposed remedy was mercy in the service of de-escalation, not a legal declaration that prosecutors lacked evidence.
According to The Atlantic's account of Cox's forthcoming book, the governor told Biden that the proposal might sound extraordinary and argued that a pardon could disrupt a growing pattern in which each party treated the other side's leaders as potential criminal targets. Biden's response convinced Cox that the idea was not merely hypothetical, but the president ultimately chose not to act.
The fact that Biden discussed the idea with Jill Biden is politically striking because it suggests the question had reached the level of private presidential deliberation before Cox raised it. It also undercuts any assumption that Biden never contemplated intervening in Trump's federal legal situation. Yet the account does not reveal why Biden decided against a pardon, what legal advice he received, whether the White House Counsel's Office studied the issue, or whether he ever discussed it with Garland or other Justice Department officials.
Those missing facts matter. Without them, the disclosure cannot establish that Biden believed the federal charges were fabricated, that he believed Trump was being selectively prosecuted, or that he knew of improper political interference by prosecutors. The Trump White House is entitled to make that political argument, but it remains an inference rather than a fact demonstrated by Cox's story.
The episode nevertheless adds a new dimension to Biden's clemency record because he later used the pardon power in ways that drew intense criticism from both parties.
On Dec. 1, 2024, Biden granted his son Hunter Biden a full and unconditional pardon covering federal offenses committed or potentially committed between Jan. 1, 2014, and Dec. 1, 2024. Hunter Biden had been convicted on federal firearms charges and had pleaded guilty in a separate federal tax case. The pardon prevented the federal criminal process from proceeding to sentencing and covered a far broader period than the specific charged conduct.
The decision reversed Biden's repeated public position that he would not pardon his son. In announcing it, Biden argued that Hunter had been singled out and that politics had infected the prosecution. The pardon became one of the most controversial acts of his final weeks in office, in part because of its breadth and the direct family relationship involved.
Hunter Biden himself revisited the controversy in August 2026. In a BBC interview, he acknowledged that the pardon was not good for the Constitution, the American public or his father's legacy, while also saying he was grateful his father had protected him. His remarks have renewed scrutiny of how Biden used clemency in the closing months of his presidency.
Biden also issued preemptive pardons on Jan. 20, 2025, to former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, retired Gen. Mark Milley, members and staff of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack, and police officers who testified before the panel. Biden said those pardons were intended to protect public servants from what he described as threatened, unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions. He stressed that the pardons should not be interpreted as acknowledgments of wrongdoing.
In another final-day action, Biden pardoned several members of his family, including his brother James Biden and James's wife, Sara; his sister Valerie Biden Owens and her husband, John Owens; and his brother Francis Biden. Those pardons also became part of the broader debate over whether outgoing presidents should use clemency defensively for relatives or political associates who have not been charged.
Trump allies now contrast those acts with Biden's decision not to pardon Trump. Their argument is straightforward: if Biden was willing to protect family members, allies and former officials from federal legal exposure, then his refusal to extend clemency to the former president shows a political double standard. The new Cox account gives that argument additional rhetorical force because Biden apparently considered a Trump pardon rather than rejecting the idea outright.
But the cases are not legally or factually identical. A pardon is an act of executive grace, not a judicial ruling on whether a prosecution was justified. A president can pardon someone he believes was fairly prosecuted, decline to pardon someone he believes was treated unfairly, or act for reasons of national interest that have little to do with the merits of a criminal case. The power is extraordinarily broad precisely because the Constitution does not require a president to apply a uniform legal test before granting clemency.
Biden's private consideration therefore tells the public something important about his political judgment in 2023: he was sufficiently concerned about the national consequences of prosecuting Trump to contemplate a step that would have been politically explosive within his own party. It does not establish that he accepted Trump's claim that the Justice Department had been illegally weaponized.
The later history of the Trump prosecutions adds further complexity. The federal election case was dismissed in November 2024 after Trump won the presidential election because of the Justice Department's longstanding position that a sitting president cannot be federally prosecuted. Special Counsel Smith's final report said the dismissal was required by Trump's return to office, not by a conclusion that the prosecution lacked a factual basis.
The classified-documents case had already been dismissed by the trial judge in July 2024 on grounds involving the special counsel's appointment. The government appealed, but the federal case against Trump ultimately could not proceed once he was elected to another term. Those outcomes were procedural and constitutional; they did not amount to acquittals on the underlying allegations.
The Manhattan case followed a different path because it was a state prosecution. A jury convicted Trump in May 2024 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He received an unconditional discharge in January 2025, meaning the conviction remained while the court imposed no jail term, fine or probation. Trump has continued to challenge the conviction, and a federal judge rejected another attempt to erase it in August 2026.
These distinctions matter because political rhetoric often collapses four different criminal cases into a single narrative. Two were federal and overseen by Smith; two were state cases brought by locally elected prosecutors. Biden's pardon power could not have reached the state prosecutions at all.
Cox's account also corrects a detail that has been repeated inaccurately in some summaries of the story. He did not say the pardon discussion occurred during an August 2023 phone call. The Atlantic account places the conversation inside the presidential limousine during Biden's visit to Salt Lake City on Aug. 9, 2023.
Cox later approached Trump with a parallel appeal for de-escalation. After the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, the Utah governor publicly endorsed Trump and urged him to use the moment to promote national unity. Cox has since said neither Biden nor Trump ultimately followed the path he hoped they would take.
That broader context is essential to Cox's purpose in telling the story. His account is part of a book about reducing political contempt, not an investigative report alleging that Biden commanded the Justice Department to prosecute Trump. Cox presents the pardon proposal as one of his own attempts to persuade powerful political figures to step away from escalation.
For the Trump administration, however, the political value of the disclosure lies in a different reading. The White House argues that Biden's willingness to contemplate clemency reveals that he understood there was something fundamentally wrong about prosecuting his likely election opponent. That claim is likely to remain a central part of Republican messaging because Trump has made allegations of government weaponization a defining theme of his second presidency.
Democrats and defenders of the former Biden Justice Department can point to the opposite evidence: Garland's appointment of a special counsel, Smith's public pledge of independent judgment, grand-jury indictments, and the absence of public proof that Biden ordered the prosecutions. They can also argue that considering a pardon for national reconciliation is conceptually different from believing a case was politically manufactured.
Both perspectives explain why the Cox disclosure is politically potent even though it does not resolve the underlying dispute. It places Biden personally inside a debate he generally tried to keep at arm's length while in office. The former president was not merely watching the legal confrontation unfold; according to Cox, he privately considered using one of the Constitution's most sweeping presidential powers to change its course.
The unanswered question is what motivated that consideration. Cox's account suggests Biden was thinking about the national consequences of the prosecutions and the pressure for 'justice' against Trump. It does not say Biden concluded Trump was innocent, that prosecutors had violated the law, or that the White House had engineered the cases.
For that reason, the strongest factual conclusion is narrower than the headline claims now circulating in partisan media. Biden considered pardoning Trump in 2023 and discussed the possibility with Jill Biden, according to Spencer Cox. He did not issue the pardon. The current Trump White House says the episode proves weaponization. The available account itself does not prove that allegation.
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What it does prove is that the possibility of presidential clemency for Trump was discussed at the highest level of the Biden White House far earlier than the public knew. That revelation is significant on its own, and it is likely to keep the debate over prosecutions, pardons and political retaliation alive well beyond the 2026 midterms.
