Investigating President Autopen
Donald Trump and congressional Republicans rightly demand to know exactly who was running the country for the four years of Joe Biden’s only term in office.
Jake Tapper and the rest of the media may have “just discovered” that Joe Biden was non compos mentis for effectively his entire term, but Democrats are still denying it and pretending everything was just fine. The rest of us knew the whole time that Biden’s was the “Weekend at Bernie’s” presidency.
The news on that front is the growing sense that many of Biden’s orders and pardons may have been signed by an autopen instead of the president of the United States. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and President Donald Trump are two men who’d like to get to the bottom of that mystery.
In a presidential memorandum Trump personally signed yesterday, he called for an official investigation of anything with Biden’s signature:
In recent months, it has become increasingly apparent that former President Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority. This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history. The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts. …
The vast majority of Biden’s executive actions were signed using a mechanical signature pen, often called an autopen, as opposed to Biden’s own hand. This was especially true of actions taken during the second half of his Presidency, when his cognitive decline had apparently become even more clear to those working most closely with him.
Given clear indications that President Biden lacked the capacity to exercise his Presidential authority, if his advisors secretly used the mechanical signature pen to conceal this incapacity, while taking radical executive actions all in his name, that would constitute an unconstitutional wielding of the power of the Presidency, a circumstance that would have implications for the legality and validity of numerous executive actions undertaken in Biden’s name.
Trump was characteristically even more blunt on Truth Social, calling Biden’s autopen pardons “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT.” Biden issued more than 10,000 pardons and commutations — a record, and quite a few more than the 237 in Trump’s first term.
The oddly specific and broad pardon Biden signed for his reprobate son, Hunter, bore a nearly illegible signature that was likely the president’s own hand. It certainly did not match the uniform and immaculate signatures on other 11th hour pardons moments before Trump’s inauguration, including for Anthony Fauci and other Biden family members.
In a rebuttal statement ostensibly from Biden, the former president retorted, “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”
Any time a Democrat says “Let me be clear,” you know he’s about to obfuscate or outright lie.
More to the point, Biden was on video last week rejecting Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s reporting on his cognitive decline but also proving it accurate: “You can see that I’m mentally incompetent and I can’t walk, and I can beat the hell out of both of them.”
Maybe he was joking.
“I’m mentally incompetent, and I can’t walk, and I can beat the hell out of both of them.”
— OutKick (@Outkick) May 30, 2025
Biden’s on a real heater today
pic.twitter.com/C1dnL1ukt0
As for Trump’s memo, the Justice Department’s Ed Martin had already announced an investigation earlier this week to determine whether Biden “was competent and whether others were taking advantage of him through use of AutoPen or other means.”
House and Senate Republicans have also launched probes. Comer has requested testimony from several of Biden’s aids, including his physician, Dr. Kevin O'Connor. If they don’t do so voluntarily, Comer says, “I will issue subpoenas.” Not a joke! Comer is primarily focused on the last days of Biden’s presidency, after his infamous debate meltdown that forced him to withdraw from the presidential campaign.
“The cover-up of President Biden’s mental decline is one of the greatest scandals in our nation’s history,” Comer said. The witnesses must “provide truthful answers about President Biden’s cognitive state and who was calling the shots.”
Indeed, that is the question. The American people elected* Joe Biden in 2020, but it is not entirely evident that he was actually the one running the executive branch. What handlers and puppeteers were doing that in his place?
We were among many level-headed observers who knew this would happen well before the 2020 election. Mark Alexander wrote of puppeteers more than once in August 2020 alone. That same month, our Douglas Andrews wrote, “Joe Biden Won’t Be the One Running the Country.”
We’re not holding our breath for a Pulitzer Prize. Nor would we want one given the farce that award has become. But Biden’s cognitive decline was perfectly evident well before Democrats propped him up to beat Trump. That Democrats foisted him on us anyway is indeed the biggest presidential scandal in American history.
