Mitt Romney revealed that he asked the Biden Administration to pardon Trump to prevent judicial weaponization

Mitt Romney recommended that the Biden Administration preemptively pardon Donald Trump. The former Utah senator said in one of his first interviews after leaving Washington, DC, in January of this year. As Romney argued in the midst of the special prosecutor Jack Smith's investigation against Trump, it could set a bad precedent for prosecuting political opponents.

Romney, the 2012 presidential nominee, was one of the most vocal Republican senators in criticizing Trump over the past seven years. Despite voting overwhelmingly in his favor, he did not hesitate to mark his disagreements in public. He was even the only GOP senator to vote in favor of condemning him in the first attempt to impeachment in February 2020.

Already during the Biden White House, he was part of a group of dialogue-minded Republican senators, pushing and voting for bipartisan bills.

"We can't start prosecuting political opponents"

Romney discussed with Dana Bash the recent indictment of the Department of Justice (DOJ) against James Comey, who was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during part of Barack Obama's tenure and a few months under Trump. Specifically, they accuse him of lying to Congress under oath and obstruction of justice.

The Republican disagreed with the indictment, stressing that "the idea that the system of justice is used to punish political opponents is a very dangerous path to go down."

At the same time, he revealed that he communicated with the Biden Administration before the 2024 presidential election, when the DOJ was investigating Trump. At the time, he told them that such an investigation was setting a bad precedent for the future.

"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,'" he said in a dialogue with Dana Bash for CNN.

"Why? Number one, I don’t want the anger and the hate and the vitriol. But, number two, we just can’t begin to prosecute political opponents. Pardoning at that point would have been a way to make that very clear," added the former governor of Massachusetts.

Asked about the response from Biden administration officials, Romney noted that they evidently "didn't listen."