Trump Promises Mass Pardons to White House Staff Before Leaving Office, WSJ Reports
The president told advisers he would pardon 'everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval' in a series of meetings, as the White House downplayed the remarks as jokes.
President Trump has repeatedly promised to issue sweeping pardons to his White House staff and advisers before he leaves office, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, with some aides taking the remarks seriously enough to view them as a standing offer of legal protection for their work inside the administration.
According to the Journal's reporting, Trump made the promise in several settings. During one gathering in the dining room adjacent to the Oval Office, the president told a group of advisers he would hold a news conference and announce mass pardons before departing the presidency. In a separate meeting, he joked that he would "pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval," drawing laughter from the room. He later revised the threshold downward, quipping about pardoning anyone within 10 feet.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back on the Journal's characterization, insisting Trump was not making formal commitments. "The Wall Street Journal should learn to take a joke," Leavitt said in a statement. "However, the President's pardon power is absolute." That last line — affirming the constitutional breadth of presidential clemency — struck legal observers as a deliberate signal.
The revelation lands against a backdrop of Trump's already extensive use of the pardon power during his second term. Within days of taking office in January 2025, he issued clemency for the vast majority of the roughly 1,500 defendants charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. He subsequently pardoned former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose legal troubles stemmed in part from efforts to challenge the 2020 election results, and Representative Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), a political rival of progressive Democrats who had been charged in a federal bribery case.
Sources told the Journal that some advisers have raised the pardon subject so consistently in private conversations that it has become a running joke, though others believe Trump's intentions are genuine. The concern inside some legal circles is whether blanket or preemptive pardons would effectively be used to immunize officials against potential future accountability for actions taken inside the administration.
Constitutional scholars have debated the legal limits of the pardon power for decades. The Constitution grants the president authority to pardon offenses against the United States, with the sole exception of cases of impeachment. Courts have broadly upheld the power to issue preemptive pardons — President Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon before any charges were filed established the precedent. However, a pardon that explicitly conditioned on the recipient committing future crimes would likely be void.
Democratic lawmakers and legal watchdog groups seized on the Journal's reporting, arguing it demonstrated a culture of impunity inside the White House. Senator Adam Schiff of California called the reports "another sign that the Trump administration believes it operates above the law." White House officials did not comment beyond Leavitt's initial statement.
The promised pardons would affect an enormous number of people if enacted at scale. The White House employs several hundred staff members in the Executive Office of the President alone, with thousands more employed across the broader executive branch in positions where they carry out the president's agenda. The scope of what Trump apparently envisioned — whether it covers senior policymakers, lower-level appointees, or both — remained unclear from the Journal's reporting.
Originally reported by Wall Street Journal.