Latest news with #pardons
Wall Street Journal
5 days ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
The Presidential Autopen is Back in the Spotlight. Here's What to Know.
President Trump on Monday waded back into a controversy over Joe Biden's use of an autopen to grant pardons during his final days in the White House, pointing to the signature-duplicating device to question the legitimacy of his predecessor's clemency decisions. 'I guarantee he knew nothing about what he was signing—I guarantee it,' Trump said while taking questions in the Oval Office, the latest in an escalating feud between the two men.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Biden denies White House aides granted clemency without his knowledge
Joe Biden has denied claims that his circle of aides acted without his knowledge when he granted a slew of pardons and commutations in the final days and hours of his presidency. 'I made every single one of those,' the former president told the New York Times in an interview published on Sunday when asked about claims that he was incapacitated and unaware of clemency decisions. Biden called the people making those claims 'liars', adding, 'They know it.' Donald Trump's successor and predecessor in the Oval Office issued three sets of clemency during his final days, including reducing sentences of hundreds of non-violent drug offenders and commuting the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates to life without parole. He pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, of convictions on federal gun and tax charges, too. And he also granted pre-emptive pardons to other members of his immediate family, along with the former top public health adviser Dr Anthony Fauci and ex-joint chiefs of staff chair Gen Mark Milley. Conservatives have alleged that the commutations and pardons, along with executive orders passed during his term, are not binding because they were signed using an autopen printer to reproduce a signature and could therefore not be verified as being directly authorized by Biden himself. In Sunday's interview, Biden hit back at that suggestion, telling the Times he hadn't personally signed the orders simply 'because there were a lot of them'. 'The autopen … is legal,' Biden said. 'As you know, other presidents used it, including Trump. But the point is that … we're talking about a whole lot of people.' Trump was asked about Biden's interview comments on Monday, and he called them 'a tremendous scandal'. 'I guarantee he knew nothing about what he was signing – I guarantee it,' Trump added, without offering evidence supporting his assertion. He went on to repeat his previously stated view that the autopen should be used for responding to thousands of letters from young people that write in. Biden's remarks come days after Kevin O'Connor, his White House doctor, declined to answer questions from a Republican-led congressional committee looking into the former president's mental acuity while in office – and whether he was aware of documents signed with his 'autopen' signature. The House oversight committee chair, James Comer, slammed O'Connor's refusal to answer questions and assertion of his constitutional rights against self-incrimination, saying: 'It's clear there was a conspiracy to cover up President Biden's cognitive decline.' Trump has claimed that Biden's autopen pardons issued to lawmakers and staff on the congressional committee that investigated the Capitol attack on 6 January 2021 have no force because they were not signed by hand. 'In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!' Trump wrote on his social media site in March. Two months before that post, Trump began his second presidency by issuing 1,500 unconditional pardons or commutations to supporters of his who carried out the Capitol attack after he lost the 2020 election to Biden. Trump, who signs orders with Sharpie, often before media cameras, has also used the autopen. But Trump has claimed he does that 'only for very unimportant papers' or signing return letters that come from 'letters of support for young people, from people that aren't feeling well, etc. 'But to sign pardons and all of the things that he signed with an autopen is disgraceful,' Trump has said. No law governs a president's use of an autopen. In 2005, an opinion from the US justice department said an autopen could be used to sign legislation, and Barack Obama became the first president to do so in 2011. Biden has previously pushed back on Republican claims he was unaware of what was being issued in his name. 'Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency,' he said in June. 'I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn't is ridiculous and false.' In his most recent remarks, to the Times, Biden accused Republicans of using the autopen issue as diversion. 'They've lied so consistently about almost everything they're doing,' he said. 'The best thing they can do is try to change the focus and focus on something else. And … I think that's what this is about.'
Telegraph
5 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
We're finally learning the awful truth about who ruled America under Biden
The autopen may be mightier than the sword – or the law – but it's not a shield. The latest revelations about the extent to which Joe Biden's staff affixed his signature to pardons and commutations in his name, using a device to replicate his handwriting, is further damning evidence of who was really running his White House. The joke is that the autopen was in charge. The sad reality is that Biden's unelected staff and family were exercising the constitutional powers of the presidency without the obvious supervision of an elected leader. Say what you will about the erratic nature of Donald Trump's decisions and public statements; when the 79-year-old does or says something, there's no mistaking his signature (although he has said he's used the autopen for 'very unimportant papers'). Not so with Biden. A report in Sunday's New York Times, including a brief telephone interview with the 82-year-old former president, discloses some new details about the scale of the auto-pardons, but it is full of cautions about how much the authors may not know. The Times piece is transparently an effort by Biden's team to use a sympathetic outlet to get a favourable spin on the facts ahead of investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. Readers will notice how far into the article one must get before encountering the facts. But even the facts we know are hard to whitewash. The scale of Biden's pardons was unprecedented. Presidents have previously used blanket pardons in the military context to grant amnesty to Vietnam-era deserters and draft dodgers and Confederate soldiers. But nobody has come close to the more than 4,000 criminal-law pardons and commutations for individuals that were issued from the Biden White House between the election and Biden's departure from office. Biden's name was affixed to more pardons in 10 weeks than Franklin D Roosevelt issued in 12 years. The most controversial of these are probably the ones that Biden actually thought through: scandalously broad pardons for Biden's family members and for polarising political figures such as Dr Anthony Fauci, alongside an across-the-board decision to clear out death row by commuting all but three of the current federal death sentences. But there were thousands more beyond that. Confirming that all of those pardons and commutations were justified in such a short time would be a Herculean labour. Biden and his team now say that he authorised the autopen to be used 25 times, some of them covering whole categories of hundreds of people based on general criteria. But who decided that each of these was a proper use of a power that the Constitution reserves personally to the president? For example, Biden mass-commuted sentences of people given home confinement during the pandemic. Some of them committed notorious abuses of public trust that harmed large numbers of people. Did the president know he was doing that? The 'process' apparently involved oral 'blurbs' from the often-incoherent elderly chief executive, which were then reported to the staff secretary controlling the autopen as authorisation for staff to give her lists of names purportedly meeting criteria signed off on by Biden. According to the New York Times, the lists sometimes changed slightly after the meetings without the president necessarily being aware. Everyone involved is lawyering up. Even Biden's doctor is pleading his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination. The entire spectacle is dramatic proof of how presidential power can be abused when the president's mental faculties are fading to match his ethical standards and nobody in the room has to worry about facing the voters ever again. Biden's allies are now trying to shift the public's focus to the narrow legal issue of whether the pardons and commutations are invalid. That's a daunting standard for his critics to meet, one without precedent in American legal history. So long as there is some basis to argue that the president authorised a pardon, there's nothing in the law that requires his personal signature. Trump's Justice Department may well decide that it's not worth the effort to fight the pardons in court. But what the law allows to happen is far from the biggest issue: it's that the pardon machine went into overdrive while the president was barely awake at the switch. The pardon power is the most absolute of all presidential powers, one modelled more closely on the power of a king than anything else the president does. The major check on its abuse is surely supposed to be that the president himself signs off on every pardon as an act of personal clemency. If even that power was falling into the hands of the staff, what does that tell us about the many other presidential powers that were wielded in Joe Biden's name while he was napping?
Fox News
5 days ago
- Politics
- Fox News
Biden chief of staff reportedly gave approval for autopen pardons on final day in office
Former President Joe Biden's chief of staff issued final approval for multiple high-profile preemptive pardons during Biden's final days in office, according to a new report. Biden's alleged use of the autopen has become a sticking point for months, as President Donald Trump has said thousands of pardons Biden signed were void and claimed that the former president did not know what documents he was signing through the automated device. Biden issued a series of preemptive pardons on his final day to officials including former Chief Medical Advisor to the President, Anthony Fauci, and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley in an attempt to safeguard them from retribution from Trump. In an article intended to be his defense for the autopen issue, it emerged that, although Biden reportedly made the decision in a meeting, Biden's Chief of Staff Jeff Zients is the one who gave final approval for the use of the autopen, at least in the case of Fauci and Milley, the New York Times reported. On Biden's final day as president, Jan. 19, Biden had a meeting with his aides until nearly 10 p.m. to talk about various preemptive pardons, the Times reports. Emails obtained by the Times show that an aide sent a summary draft of the decisions formalized during that meeting to Zient's assistant at 10:03 p.m. The assistant sent the email to Zients and others present in the meeting, requesting approval from Zients and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed at 10:28 p.m., the Times reported. Zients replied all to the email three minutes later, the outlet said. "I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons," Zients said in the email, according to the Times. Zients could not be immediately reached for comment by Fox News Digital. Additionally, the Times report said that Biden did not personally approve each name included in the broad, categorical pardons. "Rather, after extensive discussion of different possible criteria, he signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence," the Times reported. In response, the White House said that the report shed light on Biden's trustworthiness, and accused the Biden administration of engaging in a cover-up scheme. "The same president who lied through his teeth to the American people for four years about everything from his health to the state of the economy should not be trusted again," White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in an email to Fox News. "The Biden administration conducted the most egregious cover-up scheme in American politics … The truth will come out about who was, in fact, running the country sooner or later, just as the truth is emerging about the state of Joe Biden's cognitive and physical health." Biden granted a total of 4,245 acts of clemency during his administration, 96% of which were granted during his final months in office between October 2024 and January, according to the Pew Research Center. Trump first accused Biden of using an autopen to sign important clemency documents in March. He has continued to bring up the issue, and sent a memo ordering Attorney General Pam Bondi to launch an investigation into Biden's autopen use in June, and to probe if the usage stemmed from a decline in Biden's mental acuity. "In recent months, it has become increasingly apparent that Biden's aides abused the power of presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden's cognitive decline and assert Article II authority," Trump wrote in the memo. "This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history. The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden's signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts." A White House official previously told Fox News Digital that Trump uses his hand signature for every legally operational or binding document. Even so, Trump has admitted that he uses an autopen for letters. An autopen is a machine that physically holds a pen and features programming to imitate a person's signature. Unlike a tam or a digitized print of a signature, the autopen has the capability to hold various types of pens like a ballpoint to a permanent marker, according to descriptions of autopen machines available for purchase.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Biden denies White House aides granted clemency without his knowledge
Joe Biden has denied claims that his circle of aides acted without his knowledge when he granted a slew of pardons and commutations in the final days and hours of his presidency. 'I made every single one of those,' the former president told the New York Times in an interview published on Sunday when asked about claims that he was incapacitated and unaware of clemency decisions. Biden called the people making those claims 'liars', adding, 'They know it.' Donald Trump's successor and predecessor in the Oval Office issued three sets of clemency during his final days, including reducing sentences of hundreds of non-violent drug offenders and commuting the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates to life without parole. He pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, of convictions on federal gun and tax charges, too. And he also granted pre-emptive pardons to other members of his immediate family, along with the former top public health adviser Dr Anthony Fauci and ex-joint chiefs of staff chair Gen Mark Milley. Conservatives have alleged that the commutations and pardons, along with executive orders passed during his term, are not binding because they were signed using an autopen printer to reproduce a signature and could therefore not be verified as being directly authorized by Biden himself. In Sunday's interview, Biden hit back at that suggestion, telling the Times he hadn't personally signed the orders simply 'because there were a lot of them'. 'The autopen … is legal,' Biden said. 'As you know, other presidents used it, including Trump. But the point is that … we're talking about a whole lot of people.' Biden's remarks come days after Kevin O'Connor, his White House doctor, declined to answer questions from a Republican-led congressional committee looking into the former president's mental acuity while in office – and whether he was aware of documents signed with his 'autopen' signature. The House oversight committee chair, James Comer, slammed O'Connor's refusal to answer questions and assertion of his constitutional rights against self-incrimination, saying: 'It's clear there was a conspiracy to cover up President Biden's cognitive decline.' Trump has claimed that Biden's autopen pardons issued to lawmakers and staff on the congressional committee that investigated the Capitol attack of 6 January 2021 have no force because they were not signed by hand. 'In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!' Trump wrote on his social media site in March. Two months before that post, Trump began his second presidency by issuing 1,500 unconditional pardons or commutations to supporters of his who carried out the Capitol attack after he lost the 2020 election to Biden. Trump, who signs orders with Sharpie, often before media cameras, has also used the autopen. But Trump claims he does that 'only for very unimportant papers' or signing return letters that come from 'letters of support for young people, from people that aren't feeling well, etc. But to sign pardons and all of the things that he signed with an autopen is disgraceful.' No law governs a president's use of an autopen. In 2005, an opinion from the US justice department said an autopen could be used to sign legislation, and Barack Obama became the first president to do so in 2011. Biden has previously pushed back on Republican claims he was unaware of what was being issued in his name. 'Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency,' he said in June. 'I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn't is ridiculous and false.' In his most recent remarks, to the Times, Biden accused Republicans of using the autopen issue as diversion. 'They've lied so consistently about almost everything they're doing,' he said. 'The best thing they can do is try to change the focus and focus on something else. And … I think that's what this is about.'
