The House Oversight Committee this morning published the results of its monthslong investigation into the Biden Cabal’s use and misuse of the autopen, in what committee chair Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) called “one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history.”
Titled “The Biden Autopen Presidency,” the report (available here) found that “as President Biden declined, his staff abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy to effect executive actions that lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized.”
“Among the most flagrant of these instances,” the report continued, “are the clemency actions taken in the final days of the Biden presidency, which not only lacked a decision memo, but also raised serious concerns from President Biden’s own Department of Justice ethics attorneys about whether ‘the President was aware of the [criminal] backgrounds when making clemency decisions’ involving violent convicted criminals.”
“Executive actions performed by Biden White House staff and signed by autopen are null and void,” Rep. Comer said in a statement today. “We are calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct a thorough review of these executive actions and scrutinize key Biden aides who took the Fifth to hide their participation in the cover-up. We have provided Americans with transparency about the Biden Autopen Presidency, and now there must be accountability.”
Indeed.
But there are at least three reasons not to pop all your corn at once.
The first is that, legally speaking, the Biden administration, House Oversight, and the DOJ are all on new ground with this one, even though autopens in various guises have been in government use for more than a century. Can you imagine the number of Treasury Department clerks we’d need to hand-sign each and every check the government sends out, from the final invoice to Lockheed Martin for a shiny new F-35 strike fighter, to your illegal alien neighbor’s illegal Social Security check?
Madness!
Although on reconsideration, maybe we’d have a lot less nonsense if there were a human being looking at all the trillions flying out the door, and having to put his name to them. But I digress.
Even though the government has used autopens for ages, no president used one to sign legislation until Barack Obama remotely signed extensions of the Patriot Act (BOO!) in 2011 and the Bush tax cuts (YEA!) two years later. In those cases, Obama was either overseas or on vacation in Hawaii, and needed to get the bills in under the signing deadline. While some expressed concern, what Obama did had the implicit understanding of Congress. The extent and secrecy with which the Biden cabal wielded the autopen are both unprecedented.
Ever since the scandal broke, I have the image in my head of staffers racing one another to the White House autopen — each trying to get their favorite EO “signed,” or their uncle pardoned from federal prison — like a scene out of Veep.
The second hesitation is that Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice has, shall we say, been a bit hit-and-miss. Not every conservative complaint against Bondi is merited — the wheels of justice do grind slowly, after all — but sometimes it seems as though Bondi barely turns them at all. “Calling on the Justice Department to investigate,” as Steven Richards put it for Just the News this morning, sometimes feels like little more than “Round up the usual suspects.”
The third is that, even if DOJ were to put the pedal to the metal on this one, you never know which way the courts will go, or how long it will take them to get there.
Recommended: Bari Weiss Sharpening Her Axe for ’60 Minutes’ Crew
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