Far from dousing a firestorm, as intended, a New York Times interview with former President Joe Biden on Monday about his controversial use of an autopen to issue thousands of last-minute pardons raised more questions and stoked legitimate outrage. The nature and timing of the interview make it clear that it was an effort to control the news narrative as investigations ramp up in the House Oversight Committee and the Justice Department. Biden bungled it as badly as he did much of his presidency.
The former president’s answers, delivered with the halting cantankerousness that became his trademark during his steep decline of recent years, underscored that he had little to do with decisions over the sweeping pardons issued in his name at the eleventh hour of his presidency. This is particularly true of “category” commutations for people Biden supposedly perceived as unjustly punished due to “historic wrongs.” These account for most of the 4,245 acts of clemency Biden granted, 96% of which came in his final months in office.
“I made every single one of those,” Biden said of the commutations. “And — including the categories, when we set this up to begin with. … Yes, I made every decision.”
But elsewhere in the interview, he admitted that “they aren’t reading off names for the commutations,” which suggests his staff hadn’t told him specifics of the cases in the “category” commutations. The only ones he really knew about were those of high-profile people such as Gen. Mark Milley and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Biden staffers were so comfortable acting independently that changes were made to the list of convicts and then run through the autopen without consulting the president again. Biden weighed in only on the criteria used to determine which type of convict would qualify for reduced sentences.
This is not how the pardon process is supposed to work. The norm is careful review of each case, with the president making the final decision on each. But, as in so many other instances, the Biden presidency shattered established expectations of presidential oversight and accountability.
The scant involvement that Biden admits to in thousands of commutations reinforces concerns brought to light by former domestic policy adviser Neera Tanden’s recent testimony to the House Oversight Committee, in which she revealed her own lack of direct knowledge of who in the inner circle ultimately authorized use of the autopen. Tanden testified that to get approval for autopen signatures, she sent “decision memos” to members of the president’s inner circle but had “no visibility of what occurred between sending the memo and receiving it back with approval.”
Who was calling the shots in the Biden White House? Not even a high-level adviser such as Tanden knew. Emails show Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, approving the autopen for lists of pardons, which implies that he was overseeing the administrative process of applying the president’s signature to clemency warrants. We hope investigators find out and reveal where the buck stopped in Biden’s final days.
BIDEN’S STAFF APPROVED MASS LAST-MINUTE PARDONS WITH AUTOPEN
Biden admits that the remainder of his clemency decisions beyond “category” commutations, the ones he appears to have participated in, were politically motivated. Using Milley as an example, he described his thought process in issuing a slew of “preemptive” pardons to protest political allies. “We know how vindictive Trump is, and I’ve no doubt they would have gone after Mark for no good reason,” Biden said. “So they may read off his name — what’d I want? I told them I wanted to make sure he had a pardon because I knew exactly what Trump would do — without any merit, I might add.”
The intention here, as with pardons for Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, for Fauci, and for the other beneficiaries of preemptive pardons, was to make sure the public never learns whether accusations against them are false or true.