President Donald Trump and top House Republicans are ramping up a sweeping investigation into former President Joe Biden’s use of a mechanical signature device known as the autopen, raising questions about the legitimacy of executive actions taken during Biden’s presidency — especially a wave of last-minute pardons signed with the device.
The investigation, led by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), gained traction after the Washington Examiner first reported on Friday about Comer’s plans for the committee to investigate whether Biden personally authorized all of his clemency orders and executive actions or whether his aides, acting on his behalf, used the autopen without valid authority.
At the center of the controversy are Republican claims that Biden lacked the cognitive ability to carry out key decisions and that unelected aides may have orchestrated policy behind the scenes. The Justice Department, now under Trump’s control, has also pledged internal reviews of Biden-era pardons under newly appointed Pardon Attorney Ed Martin.
A staffer familiar with Martin’s plans told the Washington Examiner that Martin “looks forward to being in a position to facilitate congressional inquiries from inside the building and to cooperate with those inquiries, because they’re all on the same team.”
Interviewing former Biden staffers will be the first move
Comer has made the autopen investigation a new front in the broader Republican effort to investigate Biden’s fitness and decision-making while in office.
In a statement after his closed-door announcement of the investigation at the annual Republican National Lawyers Association event, Comer said his panel would commence its investigation into “the cover-up of President Biden’s mental decline and use of autopen,” even teasing that he believes he knows which former Biden staffer operated the device.
Comer said he plans to subpoena former Biden aides Annie Tomasini, Anthony Bernal, and Ashley Williams, who he says “ran interference” for the president and may have coordinated the use of the autopen.
“Now that Biden’s top enablers can no longer hide behind the power of the presidency, we’re continuing our investigation to expose the truth,” Comer said.
Although Comer has named three former aides to Biden, Kyle Brosnan, chief counsel for the Oversight Project, formerly part of the Heritage Foundation, said House Republicans should consider additional names to subpoena, including those who received the blanket pardons from Biden just before he left office.
“I would hope and expect that the people that received those preemptive pardons are on the deposition list,” Brosnan told the Washington Examiner. “They’re certainly eligible to be deposed in this situation, and they cannot assert the Fifth Amendment for these pardons either.”
Legal concerns emerge over pardons and executive authority
Republicans have pointed to Biden’s final-week pardons and clemency grants as a focal point for legal scrutiny. Among the figures who received preemptive clemency were former COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci, former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, and members of the House Jan. 6 committee.
Several of the pardons were signed between Jan. 16 and Jan. 19, just days before Trump’s inauguration. According to public filings and internal memoranda obtained by congressional investigators, a significant number of clemency warrants were executed using batch-format autopen signatures, raising questions about whether Biden was directly involved in the process.
Also included in the final clemency wave were Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and James Biden, his brother, both of whom had been under various federal investigations. GOP lawmakers say the use of preemptive pardons to shield Biden family members from potential future charges may constitute abuse of executive power.
Brosnan said the legal questions are serious: “The Constitution vests the power of pardon in one person and one person only — the President of the United States.”
“If it’s autopened, it opens up a whole can of worms,” Brosnan added. “Did the president [himself] authorize this? Was there a written authorization? Who controlled the autopen? What procedures were in place to ensure it wasn’t being misused?”
Brosnan added that Biden’s DOJ had previously argued in Jan. 6 cases that accepting a pardon implies guilt, questioning why the same standard of reasoning should not also apply to the former president’s family and political allies.
“It’s a reasonable question for Congress to ask,” he said. “What crime did Hunter Biden admit to? What about James Biden, or the dozens of others granted immunity preemptively?”
Researchers believe at least 32 clemency warrants signed using autopen
The Oversight Project has spent months reviewing Biden-era documents and clemency orders. Of the 57 total clemency warrants issued during Biden’s presidency, affecting over 4,000 people, 32 were signed using the autopen, according to a March 17 report from the Oversight Project.
Even more notable: The group found two distinct versions of Biden’s signature, which they identified as “Autopen A” and “Autopen B,” Brosnan added.
“These are some of the broadest pardons we’ve ever seen,” Brosnan said, noting especially the ones issued in the waning hours of Biden’s term. “Traditionally, pardons absolve past crimes — so if Biden’s team is issuing pardons as blanket immunity, that’s not just a break from history, that’s a constitutional problem.”
Trump is all in on investigating Biden’s use of the autopen
During his visit to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Trump alleged that aides may have used the autopen to enact more lenient immigration policies without Biden’s knowledge.
“We’re going to start looking into this whole thing with who signed this legislation,” Trump said. “Who signed legislation opening our border? I don’t think he knew.”
Trump did not cite specific legislation or provide evidence for his suspicions but claimed that the device was operated by “radical Left lunatics” who were frustrated that Biden, not Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), had won the Democratic nomination.
“They said, ‘Wait a minute, this is a gift. He’ll do anything. We’re going to use the autopen,’” Trump said. “And they used the autopen on everything.”
Although many of Biden’s orders were not signed in public, the president, on numerous occasions, signed orders for the public to witness, meaning that not all of Biden’s actions will be under the microscope of the committee’s investigation. However, many of the controversial actions that occurred behind closed doors, such as clemency grants, will be fair game.
The legality of using the autopen is not in question. Rather, the investigation will revolve around whether the president explicitly authorized his top aides to use the technology to sign orders in his name or whether it was done without his consent.
Trump himself has acknowledged limited ceremonial use of the autopen. In March, he said, “We may use it, as an example, to send some young person a letter, because it’s nice.”
Following his visit to the Capitol, Trump ramped up his interest even further in the retroactive investigation of Biden’s autopen use, specifically as it relates to executive orders signed by Biden that he said led to “open borders.”
“Biden was not for open borders… They stole the presidency,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “This is TREASON at the highest level!”
Concerns over Biden’s physical and mental state were intensified this week ahead of the release of Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, a book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, which reports that top aides worked to conceal Biden’s deteriorating cognitive abilities from the public.
Biden announced Sunday that he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer, which drew bipartisan well wishes for his health but sparked larger questions about how such an advanced disease could have progressed without his world-class doctors detecting it.
“I’m surprised that the public wasn’t notified a long time ago because to get to [Gleason score grade] nine, that’s a long time,” Trump said in response to a reporter’s question Monday evening.
Ed Martin’s support from DOJ gives GOP a boost
Trump’s appointment of Martin to oversee the Office of the Pardon Attorney and the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group puts a key ally in position to examine Biden’s clemency orders from inside the DOJ.
Martin, a former “Stop the Steal” organizer whose nomination to serve as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia collapsed earlier this month, has vowed to scrutinize Biden’s final actions in office.
TRUMP RENEWS CRITICISM OF BIDEN ‘AUTOPEN’ USE AFTER HUR INTERVIEWS AUDIO LEAKS
“I do think the Biden pardons need some scrutiny,” Martin said at a press conference on May 13. “We want pardons to matter … to be accepted and to be something that’s used correctly.”
With the power to review and document clemency decisions, and now tasked with investigating alleged political weaponization, Martin’s dual roles could accelerate GOP efforts to determine whether the autopen was used legally, or as Republicans now claim, as a tool for bypassing presidential accountability.