Posted on Tuesday, July 15, 2025
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by Shane Harris
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20 Comments
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I’ve spent the last few years documenting the myriad “right-wing conspiracies” that turn out to be verified facts a few months or years later. This week, we have a new entry in the genre that should be sending the conservative legal movement into overdrive: Biden really did have no clue who he was pardoning in the waning moments of his presidency.
Just days before Biden left office, a flood of pardons and clemency grants began pouring out of the White House for individuals ranging from the president’s troubled son, Hunter, to former NIH official Dr. Anthony Fauci; Michael Conahan, a former Pennsylvania judge at the center of the infamous “Kids-for-Cash” scheme that sent children to for-profit detention centers in return for millions of dollars in kickbacks; Adrian Peeler, a man convicted of killing an eight-year-old boy and his mother; and former Illinois city comptroller Rita Crundwell, who pleaded guilty to her involvement in a nearly $55 million embezzlement scheme in 2012.
In total, more than 1,500 individuals enjoyed this outpouring of mercy – but it now appears Biden himself may have had no idea most of it was happening.
This week, The New York Times published a story titled, “Biden Says He Made the Clemency Decisions That Were Recorded With Autopen.” It’s a headline that appears, on the surface, to quiet the mounting outrage over the extensive use of the autopen during Biden’s term. (The autopen is a machine used by the President’s staff to automatically replicate his signature on official documents, allowing for legal authorization without the President signing by hand.)
But buried deep in the piece is this shocking admission: “Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons… Rather, after extensive discussion of different possible criteria, he signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence.”
In other words, Biden’s staff had him approve vague guidelines for who should get pardons, and then unelected staffers went out and made their own determinations. But even then, it appears Biden had no direct knowledge of even so much as the names of those he was pardoning. As the Times reports, “Rather than ask Biden to keep signing revised versions, his staff waited and then ran the final version through the autopen, which they saw as a routine procedure.”
That fits with a bombshell investigation from the Heritage Foundation earlier this year, which found that virtually every presidential document other than the announcement that Biden was dropping out of the race and Biden’s pardon of Hunter was signed using the same autopen signature, rather than an original signature from the President. It also vindicates the Trump White House and congressional Republicans, who are pursuing an investigation into the Biden administration’s potentially illegal use of the autopen.
There is no other way to view this than as a blatant violation of the Constitution and an intentional effort to deceive the American people about who was really running the country and making critical decisions on issues like pardons and clemency.
Before Biden dropped out of the race last year, his critics were smeared as “conspiracy theorists” or worse for the suggestion that Biden was in such a severe state of cognitive decline that he wasn’t making even basic decisions. Now, we’ve learned that by January 2024, things had become so bad that unnamed Biden staffers were using the autopen to free literally hundreds of people from prison based on broad lists of “suggestions” that they themselves had presented to the President.
The only thing more shocking than that revelation is the relatively muted response to it. Sure, Republicans and conservative pundits are justifiably making hay of it, but where are the condemnations from Democrats? When Biden issued the pardons, there were at least a few voices on the left who were willing to criticize the White House for releasing convicted murderers and fraudsters. Now, it’s crickets.
Moving forward, this should only add fuel to the fire of Republican efforts to get real answers about how much Americans were lied to during Biden’s presidency and who was responsible for those lies. That accountability effort should start with dragging as many Biden aides before Congress as is necessary to get the full story.
The success or failure of that effort has implications far beyond just setting the historical record straight and giving the American people the truth they deserve. It goes to the heart of whether we still live in a functioning republic. The presidential pardon power rests with one person – not a committee of anonymous aides armed with a signature machine.
If unelected staff can wield that authority in the name of a president who is barely aware of what’s happening, the entire system of checks and balances collapses. Preserving the integrity of our constitutional order demands full transparency, strict oversight, and serious consequences for those who abuse the public trust.
Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
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