Joe Biden may have come closer than anyone knew to handing Donald Trump the ultimate political get-out-of-jail-free card.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox claims Biden revealed during a private 2023 conversation that he and first lady Jill Biden had discussed pardoning Trump as the former president faced a growing pile of criminal charges.
The startling exchange appears in Cox’s upcoming book, Off Ramp: How to Be a Peacemaker in an Age of Contempt, according to an excerpt published by The Atlantic and reported by Mediaite.
Cox said the conversation unfolded inside a limousine during Biden’s August 2023 visit to Salt Lake City.
The Republican governor decided to make a wildly unexpected pitch: Biden should use his presidential pardon power to spare the man who could soon become his general-election opponent.
Biden’s reported response was even more surprising.
“You know, I’ve actually considered this for a while,” Biden told him, according to Cox.
The then-president allegedly added that he and Jill Biden had held a lengthy conversation about the idea in bed earlier that same week. Cox said Biden promised to give the proposal serious consideration.
At the time, Trump was facing two federal prosecutions—one involving classified documents kept at Mar-a-Lago and another tied to his efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.
Those were the only cases Biden could have touched. A presidential pardon applies to federal offenses, not Trump’s state charges or the civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The private conversation reportedly came as Cox publicly went out of his way to welcome Biden to deep-red Utah.
Cox was the lone high-profile Utah Republican to attend Biden’s speech at a Salt Lake City veterans hospital, where the president promoted expanded benefits for veterans exposed to toxic substances.
“There has been some question over whether or not the governor of the state of Utah would welcome the president of a different party,” Cox told the crowd, according to KUTV.
Cox called the controversy over simply welcoming a president from the opposing party “insane” and urged Americans to find ways to disagree without treating political rivals as enemies.
That appeal became the central theme of his new book—and apparently drove his extraordinary pardon proposal.
Biden ultimately kept the pardon pen away from Trump.
But he certainly did not put it away altogether.
After repeatedly insisting that he would not intervene in his son’s criminal cases, Biden issued Hunter Biden a sweeping pardon in December 2024 covering potential federal offenses committed over nearly 11 years.
Hours before leaving office, Biden also granted preemptive pardons to five family members, Dr. Anthony Fauci, retired Gen. Mark Milley, members of the House Jan. 6 committee and police officers who testified before it, according to Roll Call.
Cox was not the only prominent Utah Republican who believed pardoning Trump could have lowered the nation’s political temperature.
Then-Sen. Mitt Romney made the same argument publicly in May 2024, saying Biden should have acted immediately after the federal indictments were announced.
“I’d have pardoned President Trump,” Romney said, arguing that the country did not want to endure the prosecution of a former president in the middle of an election.
No pardon ever came.
Trump instead won his way back to the White House, and the federal cases against him were abandoned after the 2024 election under the Justice Department’s longstanding policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
Cox later endorsed Trump after the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, hoping the near-tragedy would push him toward a more unifying political style.
