Trump Cryptically Suggests Biden Should Have Pardoned Himself

Donald Trump on Fox News.
Fox News

Donald Trump has suggested Joe Biden should have pardoned himself before leaving office.

Trump has long complained his predecessor used the justice department to unleash political retribution against him, including a pair of federal indictments in Florida and Washington.

Now it appears Biden may soon be the target of retribution himself.

“This guy went around giving everybody pardons,” Trump said of Biden, referencing 11th-hour preemptive pardons he announced Monday morning. “And you know, the funny thing, maybe the sad thing, is he didn’t give himself a pardon.”

Trump made the cryptic remark to Fox News’ Sean Hannity in an Oval Office interview that is scheduled to air Wednesday at 9 p.m. EST. Fox shared a minute-long teaser earlier in the afternoon, however.

Trump’s comment came after Hannity began a question by saying, “Joe Biden ran and said he would never do preemptive pardons. It was an issue that came up when you were leaving the first time—”

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The president saw where the question was going and cut Hannity off. Trump said he never considered giving himself or his close allies a preemptive pardon because he knew they had done nothing illegal.

“We had people that suffered,” Trump said of his allies. “They’re incredible patriots... You had [Steve] Bannon put in jail. You had Peter Navarro put in jail. You had people that suffered and—far worse than that—they’ve lost their fortunes. They’ve lost their whatever, their nest egg, paying it to lawyers and those people.”

Trump claimed Bannon and Navarro, who each spent four months in the clink on a contempt of Congress charge, likely would not have accepted a pardon if he offered it in his presidency’s final days.

Biden said in a statement Monday he pardoned his siblings and their spouses because he fears political “attacks” against his family will continue after he left office. He snuck the pardons in less than an hour before Trump was sworn in, when all eyes were on the Capitol Rotunda and its arriving guests.

News of the pardons were initially buried among a busy inauguration day that included an audio snafu, questionable first lady style, notable no-shows, a rash of executive orders, Elon Musk’s now-infamous rally gesture, and much more.

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Trump has since made clear he will not stay silent about Biden’s final presidential act, however—especially after it was Biden who warned against blanket, preemptive pardons back in 2020.

Biden’s pardons are even controversial within his own party. Sen. Adam Schiff, of California, told ABC News last month that he did not want a pardon from Biden for his work on the Jan. 6 Committee. He told the network that “preemptive blanket pardons on the way out of an administration is a precedent we don’t want to set.”