The Biden Autopen Scandal

National Review Online

Thursday, July 17, 2025

 

In an email uncovered by the New York Times, from the day before Trump’s second inauguration, Biden chief of staff Jeff Zients told the White House, “I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons.” It was the culmination of a series of events that handed over the execution of the presidential pardon power to staff.

 

It’s not often that the media get a second chance to finally dig into a story they deliberately avoided. But, in the discovery of this and many other emails, the media should be trying to recover their lost credibility after years of ignoring the scandal that was President Biden’s declining health and mental capacity. Zients’s email shows clear evidence of the White House doing something novel and controversial to make up for the diminished capacities of the president. We have strayed a long way from Abraham Lincoln individually reviewing death sentences and Grover Cleveland personally vetoing individual pensions.

 

Instead, they are printing Biden’s denial that he was cut out of the loop while his authority was usurped and exercised by the White House. “I made every single one of those,” he told the New York Times. But did he even see them? What did the president not know, and when did he not know it?

 

Shouldn’t the media be hounding administration officials so as to confirm whether or not this could possibly be true? So far, there’s little more than downplaying. NBC News did a story lamely comparing the president’s use of the autopen to the placement of a digital signature on legal documents, as done by Representative James Comer when sending letters to the White House. That this is routine in Washington is quite different from whether the president knew who was being pardoned in his name.

 

Biden granted 4,245 pardons and clemencies in his four years in office, a stunning record that dwarfs the 245 issued by Trump in his first term. And not all of them show evidence of careful deliberation by a man fully in charge of the process. In fact, we know there was a lack of deliberation — and, certainly, of discrimination, of individualized clemency — because Biden admitted to the New York Times that he did not individually approve each pardon; rather, we are to believe that he developed broad categorical parameters with top advisers and then relied on staff to fill in the names that seemed to fit these bills. (If you missed that, the Newspaper of Record managed to mention it in the 36th paragraph of its dense, 3,100-word report.)

 

Among thousands of acts of clemency was a decision to commute the sentence of Adrian Peeler, a 48-year-old convicted of conspiring to murder an eight-year-old boy and his mother in 1999, a notorious crime that caused the tightening of state laws by the Connecticut legislature. Peeler wasn’t set to be released until 2033. At the time, Senator Blumenthal, clearly scandalized by Biden’s clemency for Peeler, speculated that somebody had “dropped the ball.”

 

Or maybe the pen was operating on its own. The autopen, for those who don’t know, is a machine that holds a pen and mechanically duplicates signatures — in this case, the president’s.

 

Traditionally, the White House used the autopen only to sign return letters to precocious children and similar generic communications with the general public. Modern presidents, including Donald Trump, have expanded its use, but as recently as George W. Bush, presidents were careful to make themselves available to personally sign anything that might be contested. The practice, even in ceremonial situations, has sometimes been deemed controversial because it involves signing the president’s name to documents he doesn’t review. But to use it for pardons is, as far as we know, unprecedented.

 

Donald Trump has broached the idea that autopen uses of the pardon power may be unlawful. This is unlikely in any situation where the president can reasonably claim to have known what was being signed in his name. But we need more facts about the use of the autopen, and how Biden’s deliberative process — whatever that means these days — was brought to bear on recommendations from the White House. Depending on these facts, this story could be one that is an extremely distasteful but legal shortcut, or it could be another screaming scandal, the usurpation of presidential authority by any number of White House staff. Or, most likely, it could be both.