Former President Joe Biden issued scathing criticism of President Donald Trump in his forthcoming memoir, saying his actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol “should follow him to his grave.”

Biden’s comments, published as a book excerpt in The Atlantic on Monday, mark some of his strongest criticism of Trump since the former president left office.

In the excerpt, Biden says Trump “led an insurrection” and slammed his decision to issue sweeping pardons of Jan. 6 defendants.

“The criminals who attacked law-enforcement officers that day didn’t deserve pardons,” Biden wrote. “They deserved prison terms.”

The former president added that Trump and the president’s supporters “continue to preen and posture like they’re supporters of law enforcement.”

“Here’s my view: You don’t get to turn a blind eye to cops being punched, speared, sprayed, and brutalized and call yourself a friend of law enforcement,” he wrote. “What Trump did on January 6, 2021, should never be forgotten. It should follow him to his grave.”

NBC News has reached out to the White House for comment on the book excerpt. The memoir, “Promise Me, America,” is set to be published on Nov. 17.

In a September interview with Time magazine, Trump acknowledged that he was considering pardoning members of his administration before his term concluded, pointing to Biden’s decision to issue preemptive pardons.

Biden issued those pardons to his son, Hunter Biden, and other members of his family, lawmakers on the congressional Jan. 6 committee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley.

Biden also described his meeting with Trump after the 2024 election, part of a tradition where the outgoing president briefs the incoming president.

Biden said that Trump’s tone “bordered on fawning” and said that Trump told him that “if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends” — a remark that the former president said left him “too stunned to respond.”

“He said my performance on job creation had been ‘extraordinary,’” Biden wrote. “He added that he’d been relieved he didn’t have to run against me. I didn’t really understand why he was buttering me up, so I cut off his compliments to move on to the business at hand.”

During the approximately two hour meeting, Biden said that he wanted to give Trump an overview of world issues that he believed would “dominate his presidency.”

“He nodded appreciatively,” Biden said of Trump. “But I noticed a curious pattern: He focused on the personalities of the leaders, as if we were sharing gossip about people at a dinner party, not discussing issues of global significance.”

Biden announced Sunday that he would not “be able to do as many conversations about my book as I’d hoped,” pointing to his fight against cancer.

“Some days are better than others,” Biden said in the post to X. “It hasn’t stopped me. But sometimes it slows me down.”