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Before leaving office, Joe Biden pardoned members of the January 6 committee, concerned that they might be targeted when he was gone.
Now, President Trump says those pardons are “void, vacant, and of “no further force or effect.”
Last Monday, he wrote on Truth Social:
Essentially, Trump is making two claims. First, he says Biden didn’t even sign the pardons himself, but instead used a device called an autopen.
An autopen is about the size of a home printer and copies the president’s signature, electronically capturing it for future use. The autopen has a mechanical arm that holds a writing utensil (Trump, like George H.W. Bush, prefers a sharpie) and it replicates that signature onto a piece of paper. It can create about 500 signatures an hour.
Trump’s second claim is even bigger; he says Biden didn’t even know the pardons existed. Because of that, Trump argues the pardons are not valid, and says he intends to go after the committee members.
How did we get here?
This all started when Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey, posted on X, saying he had sent a letter to the DOJ on March 5. In the letter, he requested an investigation into whether Biden’s “cognitive decline allowed unelected staff to push through radical policy without his knowing approval." He claimed that Biden’s staff and political allies may have taken advantage of his mental state to issue presidential orders without him even realizing it.
The next day, the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation – the group behind Project 2025 – posted Bailey’s letter, along with this bold message: “WHOEVER CONTROLLED THE AUTOPEN CONTROLLED THE PRESIDENCY.”
The Oversight Project also said they had gathered every document they could find with Biden’s signature throughout his presidency and found that all of them used the same autopen signature, except for one: the announcement that the former president was dropping out of the race last year.
The post also included two images of Biden’s signature that look the same and one that’s different.
Here’s the post:
The story went viral, and soon, Trump was posting about it himself. “Everything was signed by autopen — almost everything,” he said March 13. “Nobody has ever heard of such a thing.”
Except President Trump also uses an autopen — more on that below.
As the controversy of the autopen gained attention and made headlines, The Oversight Project released a memo on March 17 with more details about their investigation. It claimed, “President Biden issued the most pardons and criminal commutations of any modern President, granting relief to 4,245 individuals. The Biden Administration granted clemency to these individuals through 51 separate warrants. We found that the Biden White House used two variations of his signature loaded into an autopen to sign 32 of the 51 warrants issued during his Presidency.”
The memo didn’t just say Biden used the autopen – it also claimed that in some instances, he wasn't even in DC when the autopen was used. “President Biden was on vacation in the United States Virgin Islands from December 27 through December 31, 2022. On the 30th, the day he ‘signed’ the pardons, President Biden was golfing with his grandson on the island of St. Croix.”
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Is any of this true?
So far, neither Biden nor his representatives have publicly addressed the claims regarding his use of an autopen to sign pardons.
In May 2024, CNN reported that Biden used an autopen to sign one piece of legislation, a funding extension for the FAA. They quoted an anonymous White House official who said, “the use of the autopen has been a rarity in the Biden administration. The White House has gone to great lengths at times to fly physical bills to Biden while he's traveling abroad, including a $40 billion Ukraine aid package the president signed while in South Korea in 2022 and a 2022 bill to avert a government shutdown while the president was on vacation in St. Croix.”
The Oversight Project’s March 17 memo claimed they “reviewed Executive Orders and other documents in the Federal Register bearing President Biden’s signature.”
The Federal Register is the government's official daily publication for executive orders and other important documents, run by the National Archives. But according to a statement from the agency, documents published in the Federal Register use a copy of the president's signature that "comes from one graphic file."
"At the beginning of each administration, the White House sends a sample of the President's signature to the Office of the Federal Register, which uses it to create the graphic image for all Presidential Documents published in the Federal Register," the National Archives communications team said.
Is it legal for the president to use an autopen?
If Biden did use an autopen, it would be legal, because there is no law in place that governs the use of an autopen. The Preamble spoke to Steve Vladeck, a constitutional law scholar and professor at Georgetown. He said, “There are a series of internal Department of Justice memoranda opining on the question – all of which have concluded that the President does not have to personally sign most official documents.”
In fact, a version of the autopen has been around for nearly 200 years. Thomas Jefferson used a polygraph, which is a similar machine that would be attached to his pen and made a second copy of what he was writing. He loved it so much that he said, “I could not, now therefore, live without the Polygraph.”
Presidents from both parties have used the autopen for various purposes, and Ronald Reagan even had 22 different signature templates. Trump recently said that he uses them “only for very unimportant papers.”
In terms of whether a president can use an autopen on a pardon, Jay Wexler, a professor of constitutional law at Boston University, said that there is nothing in the Constitution requiring pardons to even be in writing, and nothing requiring it to be signed or include a signature. He said, "The argument that the pardon fails because it was signed by an autopen fails at the get-go, because there's no requirement that the pardon even be signed.”Sarah Isgur, former Director of the Office of Public Affairs at the DOJ, told The Preamble that, “These pardons will stand unless someone can prove the president didn’t intend to pardon those people.”
“There’s just layer upon layer as to why this isn’t going to happen,” she said.
Which begs the question, is it legal to use on bills?
Vladeck said to The Preamble, “President Trump's claim is not just meritless; it's silly. As the myriad Department of Justice memoranda considering the question make clear, the only matter that's remotely debatable is whether the President must place a wet, original signature on legislation, and that's because the Constitution specifically refers to the President ‘sign[ing]’ bills. Even there, the Department has persuasively explained why the answer is ‘no.’”
One of the memos he’s talking about is from George W. Bush’s administration. In 2005, the DOJ released a 29-page report asking whether the president has to be there in person to sign a law. They concluded that the president "need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law. Rather, the President may sign a bill within the meaning of Article I, Section 7 by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.”
What the report is saying is that even if the president grants the authority to someone else to use an autopen to sign a bill, it's still legally understood that the president signed the legislation.
“Especially in an age in which we've come to rely upon electronic signatures over wet, hand signatures, the notion that we should retrofit the latter requirement onto constitutional actions that don't require a signature at all is a waste of everyone's time,” Vladeck said.
If using an autopen is legal, why has it become such a big deal?
Vladeck says, “As is so often the case with President Trump, I suspect he enjoys the idea of trying to call into question matters that have long been settled – not because he's necessarily going to succeed, but to try to insinuate that his predecessors did something nefarious. Here, there's the added value of calling into question pardons to which he objects, so from his perspective, it's a two-fer.”
Isgur agreed, saying, “This is what he does to control the news cycle.”
Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of the Jan. 6 committee members, welcomed a legal battle. He said, “Bring it on. Like, honestly… We made it very clear what happened on Jan. 6. America made a decision. And there is one person that’s obsessed about the 6th because he still has been basically deemed guilty in the court of public opinion, and that’s Donald Trump. And he can’t handle it. He obsesses about it.”
The Oversight Project says they intend to conduct a forensic investigation, including filing FOIA requests, to try and answer the “profound legal questions” surrounding Biden’s “diminished mental capacity,” and whether “under any view of the law” Biden should have been allowed to use an autopen.