Republican Gov. Spencer Cox says Joe Biden told him in a presidential limousine that he and Jill had already spent a week discussing whether to pardon Donald Trump, then never did it.
Cox, who governs Utah, made the disclosure in his upcoming book, excerpts of which The Atlantic published Thursday. The governor recounted a August 2023 meeting with Biden in Salt Lake City in which he raised an idea he knew would sound unusual, and got an answer he did not expect.
"Mr. President, I know this might sound crazy, but I think you should pardon Donald Trump," Cox recalled telling Biden during a ride in the presidential limousine. Biden, rather than dismissing the suggestion, told the governor he had been turning the same thought over in his mind.
"You know, I've actually considered this for a while. In fact, just this week as we were lying in bed, Jill and I had a long conversation about it."
That is Biden's response as Cox recounts it. The exchange took place just days after Trump was hit with a federal indictment tied to his alleged effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, and while Trump was already facing separate federal charges for allegedly mishandling classified documents.
Cox's argument was straightforward: pardoning Trump would deescalate the political turmoil and break the cycle of partisan retribution. Biden, as the New York Post reported, noted that people were "demanding justice" but indicated he was genuinely entertaining the idea. A Biden spokesperson did not respond to the Post's request for comment.
The governor was not supporting Trump's re-election bid at the time. His pitch was not partisan loyalty. It was a pragmatic case that prosecuting a former president would pour gasoline on an already volatile political environment. Biden, by Cox's account, seemed to agree, or at least to take the argument seriously enough to promise he would legitimately consider it, as the Washington Examiner noted.
The pardon never materialized.
Instead, the legal machinery kept grinding. A few days after the Cox-Biden limousine conversation, Trump was indicted on state charges in Georgia over his alleged efforts to interfere in the presidential election there. He was already in the middle of his Manhattan trial for allegedly falsifying business records. A presidential pardon would not have reached either the Georgia or Manhattan cases, those were state-level prosecutions beyond federal pardon power.
Trump was eventually convicted on 34 felony counts at the end of the Manhattan trial. But after he defeated Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, the federal cases and the Georgia case were all dismissed.
Biden granted 80 pardons during his single term. The list included his son Hunter Biden, who received what was described as a rare unconditional pardon, and former COVID czar Anthony Fauci. Trump's name was not on it.
The contrast is difficult to miss. Biden told a Republican governor in private that he was seriously weighing a pardon for his political rival, a move that could have lowered the national temperature. He then spent the rest of his term watching the prosecutions proceed, and in his final hours in office, as Newsmax reported, issued preemptive pardons to family members and other officials instead.
Hunter Biden has since been vocal about his father's presidency. He called Merrick Garland his father's "greatest mistake" as attorney general, a remarkable public admission from a man who personally benefited from one of Biden's most controversial pardons.
The pardon Biden gave Fauci also drew sharp scrutiny. Rep. James Comer warned that a blanket pardon would not shield Fauci from consequences if he lied under oath in future congressional testimony, a reminder that pardons settle legal exposure, not political accountability.
The limousine conversation was not the first time the idea of pardoning Trump surfaced around Biden. Months before the Salt Lake City meeting, Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked Biden directly about a potential Trump pardon. Biden cracked a smile, waved off the question, said "I'll see you guys," and called it "a great question."
That answer looked like a brush-off at the time. Cox's book now reframes it. Biden was not dismissing the idea, he was already chewing on it. He and Jill were discussing it at night. He told a sitting governor he had "actually considered this for a while."
It is unclear whether Jill Biden encouraged or discouraged her husband from following through. Cox's account does not resolve that question. What it does establish is that the decision not to pardon Trump was deliberate, not an oversight, not a matter Biden never got around to. He weighed it, discussed it with his wife, heard the case from a Republican governor, and chose not to act.
That choice let the prosecutions run their course through the 2024 election cycle. Trump campaigned as a defendant, won the presidency, and watched the cases collapse after his victory. The pardon question became moot, resolved not by Biden's judgment but by the voters'.
The broader pardon landscape has shifted since then. President Trump has himself weighed issuing 250 pardons to mark America's 250th anniversary, a move that would dwarf Biden's total and signal a very different philosophy about executive clemency.
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden has continued making headlines of his own, cheering socialist primary wins and telling Democrats that "the middle is not a strategy", a posture that sits uneasily next to his father's claim to have been the moderate, stabilizing force in American politics.
Cox's revelation strips away any pretense that Biden simply never thought about it. He thought about it. He talked about it with his wife. He heard the case from a Republican who had nothing to gain from making it. And then he let the prosecutions roll forward while reserving his pardon power for his own son and his own allies.
Biden's defenders might argue that pardoning Trump would have looked like an admission that the charges were political. But Biden's own words to Cox, that he had "actually considered this for a while", suggest he understood the case for clemency on its merits. He simply chose not to extend it to the man he was running against.
When a president tells you in private that he seriously considered doing the right thing, and then does the opposite in public, that is not moderation. That is calculation.
