Former Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said on Monday he tried to get the Biden administration to issue a preemptive pardon to President Trump during the investigation into Trump’s efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.

“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,’” Romney, a former GOP presidential nominee and Massachusetts governor, told CNN’s Dana Bash at an event at Drew University in New Jersey.

Romney said he feared the possibility of prosecuting political opponents.

“Why?” Romney continued. “Number one, I don’t want the anger and the hate and the vitriol. But, number two, we just can’t begin to be prosecuting political opponents.”

“Pardoning at that point would have been a way to make that very clear,” he added.

Asked what the White House said in response, Romney smiled and said, “They didn’t do that.”

Romney at times spoke out against Trump during his first term and became the only Republican to vote to convict him in both his impeachment trials, including in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

During the discussion on Monday, he said he disagrees with the Trump Justice Department’s decision to indict former FBI Director James Comey, who faces charges of making a false statement as well as another for obstruction of a congressional proceeding in connection to testimony he gave before the Senate in 2020. 

“The idea that the system of justice is used to punish political opponents is a very dangerous path to go down,” Romney said.

“I just don’t think that’s the right path to go down,” he added. “I’d go down a different path.”

Trump has long called for charges against Comey, whom he blames for the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia in the 2016 election something he has deemed a “witch hunt.” The weekend ahead of the indictment, Trump appeared to explicitly pressure his attorney general to pursue a case against Comey and others.

Romney speculated that the president’s past embarrassment could be driving his call to prosecute his enemies.

“The most powerful negative emotion is humiliation. If you’ve been humiliated, the response is the most significant,” Romney said.

“And I think President Trump, when he was not in office, was humiliated by these actions where he sat in a New York courtroom at the defendant table being chastised by a judge and being attacked by a prosecutor who in his campaign and said he was gonna bring Donald Trump an indictment and put him on trial.”