Many people first heard the term “autopen” when President Donald Trump accused his predecessor of using it illicitly earlier this spring.
“The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Trump wrote on March 17.
That accusation has now set off a full-blown investigation by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee as part of a wider set of questions about the Biden health cover-up that ensnares his family and his administration’s top deputies.
But former President Joe Biden was far from the first president to use an autopen. In fact, the device is even older than the 82-year-old.
Autopen devices are used to generate signatures without the signer’s input, and have been used for more than two centuries by politicians and other prominent figures with an in-demand John Hancock. As the name implies, the machine does not produce a stamp or copy of a signature, but creates one using an actual pen held by a machine.
The first president to use one was Thomas Jefferson, who began using a rudimentary autopen soon after the device’s invention in 1803. This iteration, developed by British-American inventor John Isaac Hawkins, was known as a polygraph and made instant copies of a signature or even entire letters as they were dictated.
Autopen has always been mildly controversial, implying an air of inauthenticity or even laziness on the part of its user. Most presidents who used them were not inclined to talk about it publicly, and the polygraph remained something of a state secret.
A more modern autopen was in use by the days of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he used it frequently. An authentic Eisenhower signature today can fetch over $400, while an autopenned one is a nice souvenir with little monetary value.
The first true presidential autopen scandal belonged to President John F. Kennedy, the subject of an entire book dedicated to the matter. In The Robot That Helped to Make a President, author Charles Hamilton surmised that Kennedy’s true signature was scarce.
“Picture a huge, faceless robot which grips a fountain pen in claws of steel,” Hamilton wrote. “At the push of a pedal, its hidden parts awake and its metal arm moves firmly and quickly over a sheet of paper to perform the very human function of scrawling a name. Tirelessly the robot works, signing thousands of letters, papers, and photographs.”
Kennedy’s supercharged autopen use, the author believes, helped fuel his narrow victory over then-Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960, hence the book’s name.
However, the Kennedy saga ironically destigmatized the autopen, and Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, became the first president to allow the device to be photographed. From then on, the device became an open secret.
By the 1970s, Nixon, now president, was so dependent on an autopen that it was one of the last things to go before the Watergate scandal forced him out of office.
“In August of 1974, on the verge of Nixon’s resignation, White House staffers figured the end was coming,” presidential historian Craig Shirley said. “But they knew it was inevitable when he shut off the autopen.”
Historically, autopen had strict limits on its use. It was allowed for form letters or other communications, but never for high-profile functions such as signing legislation. This meant that bills were often flown out to the president if he was away and then carried back by a staffer to Washington.
In 2005, former President George W. Bush instructed his Department of Justice to check out what was legally required to sign a bill. The dispensation he received said that he could use the autopen to sign legislation if desired. But Bush backed down and, in one instance, rushed from Texas to Washington to sign in person a hot-button bill regarding medical treatment for Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who was severely brain-damaged.
The DOJ’s advice sat dormant for another six years.
Prior to 2025, the closest thing to a true autopen scandal occurred in 2011. Former President Barack Obama was aware of the 2005 dispensation and decided to use it midway through his first term.
Obama visited France for the 2011 G8 summit and, while there, needed to sign a bill extending the Patriot Act. Rather than fly back or have the bill flow to him, he had the autopen do it from 4,000 miles away. Obama used it again from Indonesia later that same year and from Hawaii in 2013.
That set off a mini-controversy, with critics pointing to the English 1677 Statute of Frauds to argue Obama could use an autopen to sign legislation only if he was in the same room as the device.
“Autopengate establishes a dangerous precedent, one that every thinking lawyer in Washington politics seemed to have overlooked,” lawyer Terry Turnipseed wrote for Slate. “Nobody should be signing bills for the president, not even when the president orders them to do so.”
“Can you imagine what mischief one could get into with the president’s autopen at one’s beck and call?” he added.
Republicans complained then, but a court challenge to the practice never materialized.
Trump has acknowledged using the autopen himself, but he says Biden’s aides may have used it without the former president’s full knowledge to arrange pardons for themselves and sign executive orders.
“He autopenned almost everything,” Trump said. “Do you think he even knew that they were using an autopen?”
Those leading the charge say that autopen was not used to sign legislation, which Biden often did himself with cameras rolling, but rather executive actions and the last-minute pardons handed out to former White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, and several members of the House Jan. 6 committee.
Biden also pardoned family members, including Hunter Biden, James Biden, Sara Jones Biden, Valerie Biden Owens, John T. Owens, and Francis W. Biden. According to Oversight Project president Mike Howell, all of those are now in question.
“I think, ultimately, these [Biden aides] are involved in criminal activity,” Howell said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “We don’t think, one, he was allowed to delegate those decisions, and two, we did not think he had the capacity to delegate them even if he was allowed to.”
The Oversight Project’s initial investigation helped bring Trump’s attention to the issue, which is now probably the most high-profile controversy in the autopen’s 222-year history.
Deadline looms for ex-Biden aides to comply with GOP autopen investigation
Of course, not everyone thinks Biden’s use of an autopen should be controversial. Many see it as a distraction at best and a form of intimidation at worst, especially considering that so many signatures in today’s world don’t use a pen at all.
“I don’t know the history of it, but I do think it’s a bogus, ginned-up issue,” Rutgers University history, media studies, and journalism professor David Greenberg said. “These days, I sign all kinds of documents with an e-signature or even by putting my name in a cursive font in a regular Microsoft Word document. Autopen has been used in lots of ways without its validity ever being impugned.”