President Autopen Was Always Soft on Crime

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, July 14, 2025

 

President Trump, speaking in the White House, June 5, regarding President Biden and his use of the autopen:

 

And you know, people use autopens for that to send a little signature at the bottom of a letter where you have thousands of them. We get thousands of letters a week and it’s not possible to do. I’d like to do it myself, but you can’t do it. To me, that’s where autopens start and stop. But I don’t think — I am sure that he didn’t know many of the things.

 

Look, he was never for open borders, he was never for transgender for everybody. He was never for men playing in women’s sports. I mean he changed — all of these things that changed so radically, I don’t think he had any idea that what was — frankly I said it during the debate, and I say it now. He didn’t have much of an idea what was going on. He shouldn’t be, I mean, essentially whoever used the autopen was the president.

 

And that is wrong, it’s illegal, it’s so bad and it’s so disrespectful to our country.

 

President Biden’s written response, issued later that day: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”

 

The New York Times, late last night:

 

Mr. Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people, he and aides confirmed. 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.

 

Even after Mr. Biden made that decision, one former aide said, the Bureau of Prisons kept providing additional information about specific inmates, resulting in small changes to the list. Rather than ask Mr. Biden to keep signing revised versions, his staff waited and then ran the final version through the autopen, which they saw as a routine procedure, the aide said.

 

So Biden gave his staff a broad sense of what criteria he was looking for in his pardons, his staff went through the potential pardon candidates and selected them, and then they ran the paperwork through the autopen. That does not quite sound like Biden’s blanket assurance that he himself made the decision about every pardon.

 

The idea that staff were given loose guidelines, and then they selected which ones fit Biden’s criteria, helps explain how Biden ended up pardoning the judge who took bribes to send kids to for-profit juvenile prisons, the county commissioner involved in the biggest corruption scandal in Ohio history, various other infamous fraudsters, and a notorious black widow who murdered three former lovers. If a felon met the president’s described criteria, that felon was in, regardless of likely controversy or other factors.