The federal investigation into whether any of former President Joe Biden’s aides mishandled his use of the autopen has not been shelved, according to three sources within the Justice Department, pushing back on earlier reports that the case had closed without any indictments.
A senior Justice Department official told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that the investigation remains active, contradicting a Wednesday New York Times report that claimed prosecutors were unable to identify potential criminal charges and had effectively dropped the matter.
“I don’t think it’s the view of smart people that it was illegal to use an autopen,” the senior official said, emphasizing that the investigation is not centered on whether the device itself is lawful. The Justice Department has long held that a president may use the autopen to approve official documents that require his signature.
Instead, federal investigators are examining whether Biden aides may have improperly used the autopen during a time when the president’s mental capacity was declining, potentially authorizing executive actions without his full knowledge or consent.
The official said the investigation is focused on the conduct of staff members surrounding the former president, rather than on Biden himself.
Investigators were said to be reviewing whether aides could have used the autopen for potential “obstruction” of the former president’s intent, as well as whether they may have bypassed his authority in approving official actions using the device, according to the senior DOJ official.
The official said “it is not the case” that prosecutors have been struggling to identify statutes that could support criminal charges and pushed back on the Times’ suggestion that investigators were looking into whether Biden himself broke the law.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, whose office in Washington, D.C., is overseeing the inquiry, declined to comment on the investigation’s status.
We cannot comment on ongoing investigations https://t.co/Kme3i9BoOf
— US Attorney Pirro (@USAttyPirro) March 5, 2026
However, when pressed about why three sources reportedly told the Times the case had been closed, the senior DOJ official declined to address the discrepancy.
The investigation has drawn in part on materials reviewed by the Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which last year conducted interviews with several former Biden administration aides as part of its own inquiry into the autopen’s use.
Biden aides who appeared for transcribed interviews included former White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, former senior adviser Mike Donilon, former counselor Steve Ricchetti, former deputy chief of staff Annie Tomasini, former senior adviser Anita Dunn, and former domestic policy adviser Neera Tanden.
Tanden was the first former staffer to admit that she had the authority to authorize the clearance of the use of the autopen, but she denied any wrongdoing that misled the commander in chief.
House Republicans argued in a report that Biden’s staff may have abused the autopen and operated it under a “lax chain-of-command policy,” raising questions about whether all Biden’s executive actions were properly authorized.
The committee asked the Justice Department to investigate “all of former President Biden’s executive actions, particularly clemency actions, to assess whether legal action must be taken to void any action that the former president did not, in fact, take himself.”
Trump and other Republican lawmakers have scrutinized a series of pardons issued near the end of Biden’s presidency, including clemency granted to several of his family members and more than 1,500 federal criminal defendants in a single day, arguing there was limited contemporaneous documentation confirming that Biden personally approved those decisions.
Biden has strongly denied the allegations.
“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency,” Biden said in a statement last year. “I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”
DOJ QUIETLY CLOSES AUTOPEN INVESTIGATION TARGETING BIDEN AND AIDES
The use of an autopen, a device that mechanically reproduces a person’s signature, is not uncommon in the presidency and has been used by multiple administrations.
Still, the issue became politically charged as concerns mounted about Biden’s obvious cognitive decline late in his presidency, prompting congressional Republicans to call for an investigation into whether aides may have exercised authority that legally belonged to the president.