President Donald Trump left the door open to pardons for White House staff and administration officials, telling reporters on Saturday that he would be "allowed" to grant them despite insisting he has not given the idea serious thought. "Well, I haven't thought of it, but I will tell you, it would be very unfair to go through what we went through for four years with the corrupt weaponization that took place," Trump said when asked about pardons for administration personnel. "So, in light of what [former President Joe] Biden did—as you know, Biden shielded many people...Certainly, I haven't thought about it, but certainly I'd be allowed to." Trump's comments came after The Washington Sun on Saturday reported that White House attorneys are evaluating whether to issue preemptive pardons for lower-level administration officials who helped carry out the president's agenda.
According to the report, a blanket pardon for all junior staffers is viewed as unlikely, though discussions have included the possibility of broader protections for officials involved in specific policy areas such as immigration, trade and military matters. In April, the Wall Street Journal reported that the president was considering issuing broad pardons for his staff. At the time, then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the newspaper "should learn to take a joke, however, the president’s pardon power is absolute." Newsweek reached out to the White House for comment.
The White House has not publicly confirmed that it is considering broad preemptive pardons for administration officials. Trump has repeatedly defended using pardons to protect people who work for him and cited former President Joe Biden's preemptive pardons as precedent. He called it the president's most important tool.
In an interview earlier this month with Newsmax, Trump argued that Biden's pardons demonstrated the breadth of presidential clemency powers. "I don't want to see people that work for me go through years of nonsense, hire lawyers, and everything else," Trump said. "I'm allowed to pardon." The president also suggested administration officials could face politically motivated investigations after he leaves office.
"I don't want to see my people go through," he said. "At the end of two and a half years, we will have done things that nobody's ever done." On Saturday, Trump appeared to go a step further when discussing investigations of administration personnel. "I certainly don't want to see innocent people go through hell and lose all their money," Trump said before turning to White House aide Margo Martin, who was standing nearby.
"Margo, you're not going to have to worry about it, OK?" he added. Trump did not explicitly mention a pardon in those remarks or explain precisely what he meant by the comment to Martin. Trump has also used clemency powers on behalf of political allies and supporters.
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