House Republicans are calling on the Justice Department to launch an investigation into the Biden administration’s use of an autopen, an effort they hope will unwind various actions taken by former President Biden.
The 100-page report released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee caps an investigation brought by the panel following questions about Biden’s mental acuity.
While House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) also asks the D.C. Department of Health’s Board of Medicine to conduct an investigation into Biden’s doctor, the most significant requests associated with the report falls to Attorney General Pam Bondi, including whether any Biden pardons should be overturned.
Presidents have, across administrations, used autopens to sign actions authorized by the president. But House Republicans in their report argue that Biden was “cognitively impaired” and that staff took a “laissez faire approach that treated the use of the autopen as a mundane practice” that did not document a chain of command on decisions.
However, the report does not point to a specific incident in which the investigators could demonstrate the autopen was used without Biden’s authorization.
“Barring evidence of executive actions taken during the Biden presidency showing that President Biden indeed took a particular executive action, the Committee deems those actions taken through use of the autopen as void,” Comer wrote.
“The validity of the executive actions allegedly approved and signed (largely by autopen) by the President Biden [sic] must be reviewed to determine whether legal action is necessary to ameliorate consequences of any illegitimate pardons granted, or executive actions implemented, throughout the Biden Autopen Presidency,” the report adds, asking Bondi to review “all executive actions attributed to President Joe Biden.”
Any investigation by Bondi could possibly lay the groundwork for further legal battles should the current Trump administration try to withdraw any actions or pardons signed by Biden.
Biden, who has generally kept a low public profile since leaving office, has at multiple points pushed back on claims from the White House and congressional Republicans that he was not the one behind major decisions during his presidency.
“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false,” Biden said in a June statement after President Trump directed the Justice Department to probe actions Biden took while in office, citing claims about his cognitive state.
In a July interview with The New York Times, Biden specifically defended his use of the autopen to sign off on clemency decisions at the end of his term, which included pre-emptive pardons for members of his family and high-profile Trump critics.
“I made every single one of those. And — including the categories, when we set this up to begin with. And so — but I understand why Trump would think that, because obviously, I guess, he doesn’t focus much,” Biden told the news outlet.
Biden said he used the autopen to sign off on the clemency decisions, “because there were a lot of them.”
“The autopen is, you know, is legal,” Biden told The New York Times. “As you know, other presidents used it, including Trump. But the point is that, you know, we’re talking about a whole lot of people.”
Several former senior Biden White House officials have appeared before the committee in recent months. Some of them – including Biden’s former physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor – have invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions.
Others have pushed back on claims from Republicans that senior aides were the ones making decisions, not Biden.
Biden signed a number of pardons and clemencies during his time in office, a group that included his son as well as members of Congress who served on the Jan. 6 committee, but most of the last-minute clemencies were given to those the White House described as non-violent drug offenders.
The report argues that pardons and clemencies are all supposed to be directly signed by the president, but that in some cases Biden gave verbal authorization for the autopen to be used.
“The fact that the Biden White House did not have—or did not follow—a set procedure governing the use of the autopen was yet another weak link in the chain of presidential decisionmaking. This represents another vulnerability which may have been exploited to carry out the duties of the diminished president without his complete understanding or consent,” they wrote, describing a “presidential pardon game of telephone” in which aides would relay the decision.
The pardons for Biden family members, the report says, was the result of an in-person meeting “for which there is no contemporaneous documentation.”
Beyond the autopen, the report spends ample time reviewing Biden’s fitness for office and the actions of staff in responding to what Republicans described as diminishing cognitive function.
“Joe Biden had good days and bad days in presenting his cognitive abilities. What has become clear to the Committee, however, is how President Biden’s inner circle worked tirelessly and creatively to conceal the president’s bad days,” the report states.
Former White House chief of staff Jeff Zients told the committee that they had adjusted Biden’s schedule to “reduce the number of steps and things of that nature” and said while the president’s ability to remember names and dates had always been a struggle, “I think it [has] probably gotten more difficult across time.”
Mike Donilon, a senior advisor to Biden, told committee investigators, “the best approach for us would be to have lightened his schedule load” and also expressed concern about rigorous travel.
Still, to the panel, taking actions to limit Biden’s workload, crafting notecards and arranging for teleprompters for small appearances and speeches while pushing back on questions about his health amount to a cover-up of his decline.
The report argues lower-ranking staff, including those defending his cognitive abilities after former special counsel Robert Hur raised questions about Biden’s mental state, had few interactions with the president.
“Aides relied on a cocoon of senior staff for updates and direction with little to no direct knowledge or insight into Biden when it came to highly visible issues,” it states.
“The politburo, or inner circle, of individuals controlling President Biden maintained the utmost control over his appearances, schedule, and clothing, among others, while sheltering the president from other members of White House staff,” they wrote, adding later that “The most visible, ardent speakers for Joe Biden rarely met or saw their boss across President Biden’s four-year term.”
The report calls that group of close aids “delusional,” because many said they had no concerns over Biden’s health or mental acuity.
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