Former President Donald Trump has initiated an investigation into claims that President Joe Biden utilized an autopen to sign official documents during his tenure in office, a common practice that Trump alleges may indicate a conspiracy by Biden’s aides to obscure his cognitive decline.
Trump’s memorandum, issued on Wednesday, directs White House Counsel David Warrington, in coordination with Attorney General Pam Bondi, to look into whether certain individuals collaborated to mislead the public regarding Biden’s mental state and to determine if they unconstitutionally exercised presidential powers without Biden’s direct input.
In a response communicated through NPR, Biden firmly asserted his autonomy in decision-making regarding pardons, executive orders, and legislation during his presidency.
“Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false,” Biden stated. “This is nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations.”
During remarks to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump admitted that he had not found concrete evidence of Biden signing documents without his approval. However, he remarked on Biden’s lackluster performance during debates, implying that it showcased a lack of control.
“But I’ve uncovered, you know, the human mind,” Trump said. “I was in a debate with the human mind, and I didn’t think he knew what the hell he was doing.”
This investigation is occurring amidst heightened scrutiny of the mental and physical health of Biden, who recently announced a diagnosis of aggressive prostate cancer. Concerns about Biden’s fitness eventually led to his withdrawal from the reelection campaign later that year.
The previous month saw the release of a provocative book titled “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” authored by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson, documenting Biden’s cognitive decline in office and his aides’ alleged attempts to keep it hidden from the public eye.
Additionally, Axios released audio clips from Biden’s 2023 interviews with Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents while he served as vice president. Hur chose not to press charges against Biden, citing that a jury would likely view him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
A 258-page transcript, made public following Hur’s February 2024 report, displayed Biden struggling to recall essential dates and details, an issue reflected in the lengthy pauses and prompts from aides during the recordings.
Biden has publicly rejected notions of cognitive decline, stating that such reports are erroneous.
In his memorandum, Trump emphasized Biden’s supposed “cognitive deficiencies” in juxtaposition with the extensive policymaking that characterized Biden’s time in office. He pointed out that the Biden administration produced over 1,200 presidential documents, appointed 235 federal judges, and issued a record number of pardons, which included commuting the sentences of 37 federal death row prisoners.
Without providing evidence, Trump asserted that an overwhelming majority of Biden’s executive actions were executed with an autopen, questioning their legitimacy.
However, it remains uncertain whether Biden actually employed an autopen— a machine that replicates signatures using real ink— to sign documents or if such use would invalidate any of his actions. Legal experts generally argue that it wouldn’t.
The use of autopens has been a standard practice by presidents for decades, including Trump himself, who acknowledged in March that he used it for “only very unimportant papers.”
“You know, we get thousands and thousands of letters, letters of support for young people, from people that aren’t feeling well, etcetera,” Trump noted during his remarks on Air Force One. “But to sign pardons and all of the things that he signed with an autopen is disgraceful.”
Legal experts contend that employing an autopen bears no significance on the validity of pardons or laws. Presidents have routinely made use of autopens for their correspondence and documentation, a practice dating back to early adopters like Thomas Jefferson and later, presidents such as Harry Truman and Gerald Ford.
The notion that Biden’s reliance on mechanical pens originated heavily from the Oversight Project, a division of the Heritage Foundation previously known for disseminating false claims about noncitizen voting in the past year. This narrative is part of a broader right-wing conspiracy alleging that Biden is not genuinely in charge as president.
Concerns surrounding Biden’s capacity to govern are not new, even from Trump, who became the oldest president inaugurated at age 78 during his second term. This is not the first instance in which Trump has questioned his predecessor’s signature legitimacy or authority.
In March, Trump claimed on social media that Biden’s preemptive pardons of members of the House committee investigating the events of January 6 were “hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OF EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen.”
However, Jay Wexler, a professor of constitutional law at Boston University, expressed skepticism at that time, indicating that the pardons could not be rescinded on those grounds or any other.
Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution states that a pardon need only be “accepted by its subject” to take effect and does not mention the possibility of reversing them. Notably, Wexler pointed out that it is not necessary for the pardon to be documented in writing at all.
“The argument that the pardon fails because it was signed by an autopen fails at the get-go because there’s no requirement that the pardon even be signed,” he elaborated, categorizing the concern as a “distraction” and a “nonstarter.”
Historically, the use of autopens by presidents has not been contested. The practice was kept relatively quiet until President Lyndon Johnson publicly embraced it, allowing photographs of the device during his administration. This led to a sensational 1968 National Enquirer cover story branding the device as “One of the Best Kept Secrets in Washington: The Robot that Sits in for the President.”
The legality of autopens was scrutinized by the Bush Justice Department in the 21st century. President George W. Bush refrained from using an autopen for signing bills. However, Donald Rumsfeld, his defense secretary, faced backlash for using one to sign numerous condolence letters to families of troops killed in the Iraq War.
Bush tasked the Office of Legal Counsel with assessing the constitutionality of autopen use for signing legislation. Their 2005 memorandum concluded that the president “need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law.”
“Rather, the President may sign a bill… by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen,” the memo stated, while clarifying that it did not advocate the delegation of the decision to approve and sign a bill.
President Barack Obama became the first known president to use an autopen for signing legislation when he extended the Patriot Act while in France in 2011. He subsequently used the device for various bills, including a tax bill signed while vacationing in Hawaii, an emergency spending bill in Indonesia in 2014, and an extension of highway funding from Malaysia.
Former Deputy Attorney General Howard Nielson, who authored the 2005 Justice Department memo, observed at that time that the use of autopens had historically surfaced during urgent circumstances, emphasizing that the decision of a president to approve a bill superseded the methods employed to sign it.
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