By It might be the biggest presidential scandal in decades and few liberals want to talk about it. A recent report has revealed that Joe Biden’s final pardons were signed with autopen by his staff and not even personally acknowledged by the president.
At the heart of the controversy is Biden’s use of an autopen—a device that replicates a person’s signature—to approve 25 clemency warrants between December 2024 and January 2025. These included nearly 4,000 sentence reductions and sweeping pre-emptive pardons for figures such as Gen. Mark A. Milley and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Critics now question whether Biden, whose cognitive acuity has long been a political flashpoint, was truly the decision-maker.
The New York Times writes that 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.
Mr. Biden’s former White House doctor, who has said his medical evaluations showed he was fit to serve, invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions from lawmakers last week. His lawyers cited the pending Justice Department inquiry and the risk of being ensnared in ambiguous circumstances. But Mr. Biden, as a former president, has greater constitutional defenses against being subpoenaed by Congress.
The full picture of what Mr. Biden did on pardon and clemency decisions, and how much he directed those decisions and the actions of his staff, including the use of the autopen, may come down to tens of thousands of Biden White House emails that the National Archives has turned over as part of the investigation by the Trump White House and the Justice Department. Those emails contain keywords like “clemency,” “pardon” and “commutation” from November 2024 through Jan. 20, 2025, according to people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.
But those that were reviewed by The Times show that that the Biden White House had a process to establish that Mr. Biden had orally made decisions in meetings before the staff secretary, Stefanie Feldman, who managed use of the autopen, would have clemency records put through the signing device.
The emails from a meeting indicated that it was on the final night of Biden’s presidency, January 19, that the president decided to issue pre-emptive pardons to members of his family for potential crimes they committed during his vice presidency.
IOW, they showed him the parameters… he gazed at them without comprehension and they ran with it.
cc: @AceofSpadesHQ
This is worse than Woodrow F. Wilson's stroke. https://t.co/MmMcSWCLPL— Arthur Kimes (@ComradeArthur) July 14, 2025
The one pardon Biden made sure to sign personally, however, was his son’s:
It speaks volumes that the only pardon Biden signed personally was Hunter’s. They knew the autopen was legally shaky so they made sure the one that mattered most was airtight. pic.twitter.com/mg9HQvKO4y
— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) July 14, 2025
The 46th president, in a phone interview with The New York Times last week, asserted, “I made every decision” regarding the clemencies granted during his term—before conceding that staff members had replicated his signature, explaining, “we’re talking about a lot of people.”
Harrison Fields, deputy press secretary of the Trump White House, said in a statement to USA TODAY that Biden “should not be trusted again” when asked to respond to Biden’s claims in the interview.
“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,” Fields said.
The probe now centers on whether pre-emptive pardons for Milley, Fauci, and others—potentially shielding them from future Trump-led prosecutions—were lawfully executed. Fauci has been of particular interest since Zients, Biden’s chief of staff, allegedly made millions of dollars from COVID pandemic protocols.
So Fauci was pardoned by the White House Covid-19 coordinator, who made tens of millions of dollars off financial bets exploiting federal government healthcare policies. https://t.co/UJdJ0vbuHm pic.twitter.com/Fp61yt7ex5
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) July 14, 2025
Meanwhile, interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin is leading a Justice Department inquiry into whether Biden’s use of the autopen violated legal norms or concealed broader incapacity.
Further inflaming suspicions, Biden’s former White House physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, has invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than testify before Congress. Comer and Sen. Ron Johnson have intensified calls to investigate whether Biden’s staff knowingly concealed mental decline and effectively ran the executive branch themselves.
If evidence confirms that top aides issued pardons without valid presidential oversight, the episode may mark an unprecedented breakdown in executive accountability. As legal and congressional inquiries deepen, the legitimacy of Biden’s final acts—and the very definition of presidential power—remain in question.
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