Republicans want to investigate former President Joe Biden’s use of the autopen. Did he personally grant broad (and possibly unconstitutional) pardons for family members, members of the January 6 Committee and Anthony Fauci, or did someone else make the decision? Was he responsible for all the executive orders issued under his name, or did White House personnel make those decisions?
If he did not personally sign various documents, are they valid?
The House has announced that the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will be investigating Biden’s use of an “autopen” to sign documents such as the pardons issued just before he left office. Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) said in a statement he plans to subpoena former Biden aides Annie Tomasini, Anthony Bernal and Ashley Williams, who he claims “ran interference” for Biden and may have overseen the use of the autopen.
Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is demanding the upper chamber hold hearings on Biden’s health and competence, and rightly so. He wants to interview people who were close to the former president. As he told Axios, “We have to. I mean, who was running the government?”
The Justice Department has taken up the issue as well, under the leadership of newly appointed “Pardon Attorney” Ed Martin, whose nomination to become Washington, D.C.’s, U.S. Attorney failed. Democrats may soon wish that they had not blocked his prior appointment.
This is not just political posturing. The Washington Examiner reports: “According to public filings and internal memoranda obtained by congressional investigators, a significant number of clemency warrants were executed using batch-format autopen signatures, raising questions about whether Biden was directly involved in the process.”
These inquiries have been spurred by new revelations about the president’s declining mental condition gleaned from the recently released “Original Sin,” written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, which chronicles the extreme measures taken to hide Biden’s deterioration from the public.
In addition, audio tapes of special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with Biden showed not just an “elderly man with a poor memory,” as Hur generously described Biden, but a person who has experienced serious mental decline. His confusion and lapses have raised even more questions about who was in charge of the country between 2021 and 2024. It’s become increasingly clear that it was not Biden.
We know this because we have a solid example where the former president was asked about an important policy switch that he had purportedly authored — and he got it wrong, denying he had made the change. Also, it was reported contemporaneously that in negotiations on important topics, Biden was reduced to reading from note cards and seemed detached from the conversations.
Someone else was almost certainly writing those note cards and giving the president his talking points. Biden was barely capable of putting two sentences together, much less sifting through details critical to crafting legislation or even policy.
The Wall Street Journal reported last June about a February 2024 Oval Office meeting between House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Biden. According to Johnson, the president denied that he had recently instituted a pause on further expansion of liquified natural gas exports, claiming instead that it was just a study. Johnson told six people about Biden’s confusion after the meeting, suggesting it indicated a slippage of Biden’s memory.
Speaking with Bari Weiss early this year, for her Substack podcast, Johnson described how the White House had tried to prevent the one-on-one encounter from taking place. Johnson told Weiss that Biden’s staff ignored his repeated attempts to schedule a meeting with the president in January 2024, but that pressure from the media eventually forced a scheduled sit-down. However, when Johnson entered the room he found Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer and Kamala Harris all gathered, ready to drill Johnson over aid to Ukraine. That was unexpected.
Biden asked the others to leave, visibly alarming his staffers. Once alone, Johnson asked the president why he had paused liquefied natural gas exports to Europe, pointing out that this action was enriching Russia and fueling Vladimir Putin’s war effort. Biden relied, “I didn’t do that.” When Johnson reminded the president of the executive order he had signed just weeks earlier, the president denied that the order mandated a pause.
Johnson has since said he walked out of the meeting shaken, thinking, “‘We are in serious trouble — who is running the country?’ Like, I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know.”
The Johnson encounter was not the only firsthand report of Biden’s diminished capacity.
In 2023, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy came away from negotiations over lifting the debt ceiling with similar misgivings. He reported that the president’s command of details wavered and that he frequently mumbled and relied on notes to steer him through the conversations.
“I used to meet with him when he was vice president. I’d go to his house,” McCarthy said in an interview. “He’s not the same person.”
The White House and even the newly aware media is now pursuing the one remaining piece of the puzzle: Who was creating and then putting in place policies supposedly vetted by the president, and who else used the “autopen” found on so many documents? Was it Mike Donilon, who is cited by a recent piece in the Times of London? Or long-time adviser Anita Dunn? We just don’t know.
This is not just a fishing expedition. The public must know if some of Biden’s rules and policies were executed without his knowledge or consent. There is a possibility that Congress could challenge the legality of measures adopted by presidential aides or officials, rather than the country’s chief executive.
A report from the conservative Oversight Project, formerly associated with the Heritage Foundation, states, “The Constitution vests the power of pardon in one person and one person only — the President of the United States.”
These challenges to the Biden legacy are just beginning. And it’s about time.
Liz Peek is a former partner of major bracket Wall Street firm Wertheim and Company.
