President Biden’s chief of staff authorized thousands of last-minute pardons signed by an autopen, raising new questions about Mr. Biden’s mental decline in office and who was really calling the shots in the White House.
Mr. Biden, 82, acknowledged that thousands of pardons, including for his family members, former aides and congressional Democrats, were signed with a mechanical signature and not his hand during the final hours of his administration. In an interview with The New York Times, the former president said he approved the pardons, but not each one specifically. Emails show decisions were made by top staffers and were approved by Chief of Staff Jeff Zients.
Mr. Zients is among the top Biden administration aides now at the center of investigations by the Justice Department and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee into whether the former president’s inner circle commandeered the autopen to sign pardons while covering up Mr. Biden’s alleged accelerating mental decline.
One of those aides, Anthony Bernal, known as the “work husband” of first lady Jill Biden, is set to testify under subpoena Wednesday about his role in making decisions on behalf of Mr. Biden and allegedly shielding him from exposure.
“New reporting confirms Biden White House staff took executive action without the president’s approval,” Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer, Kentucky Republican, said Monday. “The House oversight committee will continue pursuing answers about this historic scandal to prevent such an abuse from happening again.”
On June 27, Mr. Comer wrote to Mr. Zients requesting his appearance before the committee for a transcribed interview in September.
“You managed a White House in disarray after public reporting began to focus on the apparent decline of President Biden’s mental capabilities,” Mr. Comer wrote to Mr. Zients. “The scope of your responsibilities, both official and otherwise, and personal interactions within the Oval Office cannot go without investigation.”
Mr. Zients is “cooperating” and is expected to provide his testimony, although the date has not been firmly established, a source familiar with the matter told The Washington Times.
President Trump said Monday that he thinks Mr. Biden was unaware of many of his administration’s major moves, including the decision to leave the border open to the influx of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. He called the Biden administration’s heavy use of the autopen indicative of Mr. Biden’s mental decline and said he would use a mechanical signature only for correspondence with the public.
Mr. Trump recently ordered the Justice Department to investigate the pardons signed with an autopen.
“The autopen, I think, is maybe one of the biggest scandals we’ve had in 50 or 100 years,” Mr. Trump said. “I guarantee you he knew nothing about what he was signing. I guarantee it.”
Mr. Biden has made two public statements asserting that the autopen was used only with his permission to pardon thousands of people and to sign off on executive orders and memoranda.
In his latest defense of the autopen, Mr. Biden said he voiced permission for all the clemency warrants and said congressional Republicans and Mr. Trump are “liars” for claiming he was disengaged with his presidential duties.
“I made every decision,” Mr. Biden told the newspaper in a phone interview last week. Mr. Biden said the autopen was employed on the clemency warrants because there were so many. “We’re talking about a whole lot of people.”
Emails disclosed in the article showed Mr. Zients, not Mr. Biden, gave the final sign-off on the huge slate of pardons and sentence reductions and that Mr. Biden did not approve the actions for each individual.
Instead, Mr. Biden said, he “signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence.”
Emails show the massive pardon list passed through a string of aides on Jan. 19 before Mr. Zients, in a “reply all” at about 10:30 p.m., told the group, “I approve of the use of the autopen for the execution of the following pardons.”
Mr. Biden, who, while serving in the Senate, helped pass one of the nation’s toughest anti-crime bills, ultimately commuted the sentences of dozens of murderers on death row to life in prison through the autopen.
The mechanical signature was used to grant clemency to other criminals, among them men convicted of killing children and law enforcement officers.
Among those who received late-night, auto-signed pardons on Jan. 19, hours before Mr. Biden’s White House exit, was COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci. Other pardons were provided to members of his family and lawmakers who served on a Democratic-led panel that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Mr. Biden said the pardons were meant to shield the recipients from Mr. Trump’s political retribution.
The heavy use of the autopen to sign the pardons was revealed earlier this year by The Oversight Project, a watchdog group that analyzed the signatures on the warrants.
Attorneys for the organization examined 51 clemency warrants bearing Mr. Biden’s signature. The warrants granted clemency to 4,245 people, a record for any U.S. president.
The Oversight Project found that more than half the warrants issued during Mr. Biden’s administration were signed using one of two autopen signatures. Oversight investigators later uncovered a third Biden autopen signature used on other documents.
The autopen is operated using a card inserted into a machine that programs the device to produce a particular signature.
Oversight Project Executive Director Mike Howell said The New York Times just months ago called the autopen analysis a “conspiracy theory” put forth by his conservative-leaning group.
“Our autopen investigation goes to the core of our constitutional republic,” Mr. Howell said Monday. “Our work has revealed that the Biden administration was a rudderless ship run by unelected bureaucrats operating in complete contradiction to the Constitution.”
