Former Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney revealed on Monday that he pressed former President Joe Biden‘s White House to issue a pardon for President Donald Trump.
Before retiring from politics in 2025, Romney served most of his time in the Senate during the Biden administration, under which the government and multiple states brought several criminal and civil cases against Trump.
While Romney, a centrist, became known during his Senate career as one of Trump’s outspoken critics, he disclosed this week that he made a phone call to the Biden White House advocating a pardon for Trump. Romney said he believed it was bad for the country’s faith in democratic institutions to watch a political leader and former president being prosecuted by the Department of Justice.
“I called a member of the White House, one of the senior advisers to President Biden, and I said if the Justice Department decides to indict President Trump, I hope President Biden will immediately eliminate that, and that he will provide a pardon immediately,” Romney told CNN’s Dana Bash.
“Why? No. 1, I don’t want the anger and the hate and the vitriol. But No. 2, we just can’t begin to be prosecuting political opponents,” Romney added. “Pardoning at that point would have been a way to make that very clear.”
As a senator, Romney was widely viewed as holding a measured take on both parties, stirring bipartisan praise during his time in Congress for espousing an independent mindset. In addition to urging Biden not to pursue charges against Trump, Romney at one point urged Trump not to push investigations into Biden.
Romney has a long history of going against Trump. He opposed Trump’s first GOP nomination for the presidency in 2016 and was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump in both his impeachment trials, making him the first senator in U.S. history to vote to remove a president from office from the same party. Romney has said he did not vote for Trump in 2020 and pledged not to vote for him in 2024.
Under Trump, “it’s pretty clear that the party is inclined to a populist demagogue message,” Romney said in a 2023 interview with the Washington Post.
During that interview, Romney also criticized Biden, then the sitting president, and Trump, who was seeking to make a political comeback for a second term.
“Biden is unable to lead on important matters, and Trump is unwilling to lead on important matters,” Romney said. “I know that there are some in MAGA-world who would like Republican rule, or authoritarian rule by Donald Trump.”
However, Romney drew the line at Biden’s DOJ prosecuting Trump.
The former senator’s latest comments to CNN come after he said in May 2024 that Biden could have made himself “the big guy” in the room by pardoning Trump.
“Had I been President Biden, when the Justice Department brought on indictments, I would have immediately pardoned him. I’d have pardoned President Trump. Why? Well, because it makes me, President Biden, the big guy and the person I pardoned a little guy,” Romney said during an MSNBC interview. “Frankly, the country doesn’t want to have to go through prosecuting a former president. … I think it’s a terrible fault for our country to see people attacking our legal system — that’s an enormous mistake.”
Biden “should have fought like crazy to keep this prosecution from going forward,” Romney added, addressing concerns that federal indictments against Trump fueled arguments that political rivals were weaponizing the justice system against him and undermined confidence in the U.S. institution.
At the time, Trump faced 88 charges over four criminal indictments in Georgia, New York, Washington, D.C., and Florida, with the latter two being federal cases prosecuted by then-special counsel Jack Smith.
On Monday, Romney suggested Trump is further undermining faith in the judicial system after the president’s DOJ announced former FBI Director James Comey, one of his top political foes, was indicted.
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Romney said Trump wants to see Comey humiliated after the FBI, under his direction, launched an investigation in 2016 into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to influence the election. Trump has often called the investigation a “hoax” after the investigation fizzled out following yearslong scrutiny.
“The most powerful negative emotion is humiliation. If you’ve been humiliated, the response is the most significant,” Romney said. “And I think President Trump, when he was not in office, was humiliated by these actions where he sat in a New York courtroom at the defendant table being chastised by a judge and being attacked by a prosecutor.”
