The Outrageous Biden Autopen Scandal
On Tuesday morning, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee released a report on former President Joe Biden’s use of autopen signatures on the many pardons and commutations he handed out during his term, and particularly near its end. Many of these were scandalous enough taken on their own terms, but what made them particularly outrageous was the suspicion that the bulk of these acts were the work of President Biden’s staff, not the senescent president himself.
After all, this was a president who had imploded onstage at the presidential debate in June 2024, revealing his basic day-to-day incoherence, and then dropped out of the presidential race via tweet a month later. One might reasonably understand how he found the time to preemptively pardon his family members, despite frequently promising never to do so, but it was harder to believe that he was setting aside personal time to commute the sentences of people like Maryland’s thrice-murdering “Black Widow” killer.
The House report confirms what voters long suspected: Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and, after he dropped out of the race, used his autopen as part of their campaign to set a new record for presidential clemency. Vast swaths of convict-applicants were granted commutations or pardons on the basis of crude search parameters and blunt filtering, not case-by-case examination.
There is little to be done but take note of the dangers of abusing one of the presidency’s core powers (not that President Trump has absorbed this lesson). Acts of presidential clemency are final. As scandalous as mass-printing commutations for the undeserving is, Biden approved of all of this, broadly speaking. One imagines he was not informed of the specifics of who was being granted presidential clemency, but he was aware of the fact that sweeping pardons were being issued under his name.
At the end of the day, this isn’t an autopen scandal so much as a Biden’s poor-judgment scandal. There were, of course, many of those prior to his late-presidency decrepitude, which made things so much worse.
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