Posted on Monday, March 10, 2025

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by Andrew Shirley

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Shocking new evidence suggests that Joe Biden was not the one really calling the shots inside the White House over the past four years – just as conservatives alleged all along.

Late last week, the Oversight Project, an investigatory arm of the Heritage Foundation, revealed on X that a study of presidential documents from the Biden administration showed that virtually every one was signed by an autopen rather than by the president’s own hand.

“We gathered every document we could find with Biden’s signature over the course of his presidency,” the Oversight Project wrote. “All used the same autopen signature except for the announcement that the former President was dropping out of the race last year.”

If the Oversight Project’s findings turn out to be accurate, it is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the scandal it would represent. It would raise the alarming possibility (which Republicans long warned of) that the country was effectively being run by unelected Biden aides rather than the duly-elected President of the United States – a soft coup d’état that should enrage every American voter, regardless of political affiliation.

An autopen is a device used to replicate a person’s signature, allowing high-ranking officials, including the President of the United States, to authorize documents without physically signing them. The autopen is often employed for efficiency, especially when signing large volumes of routine paperwork, such as proclamations, letters, and some legislation. But an autopen signature has all the legally binding power of the president’s actual signature.

Unsurprisingly, use of the autopen is somewhat controversial. In theory, a group of rogue staffers could use the autopen to enact policies without the approval or even the knowledge of the president.

This appears to have been what happened in at least one incident that House Speaker Mike Johnson recounted earlier this year, in which Joe Biden claimed that he had no knowledge of an executive order with his signature on it.

“Sir, why did you pause liquid natural gas exports?” Johnson recounted asking Biden, to which the president appeared stunned and said he would never do such a thing.

“Sir, you paused it, I know,” Johnson retorted. “I have the export terminals in my state. I talked to those people in my state, I’ve talked to those people this morning, this is doing massive damage to our economy, national security.” But Biden continued to deny that he froze LNG exports.

“I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, ‘We are in serious trouble—who is running the country?’” Johnson said. “Like, I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know.”

Johnson further speculated that the notion that Biden could not run the country was what made him an attractive candidate to Democrat power brokers in the first place. He theorized that when Democrat candidates dropped out of the crowded 2020 primary field, they agreed to endorse Biden in exchange for putting “one of their people” in key positions in his administration. These people, he asserts, exerted significant influence over Biden and “led us into absolute chaos.”

Biden had an infamously poor memory throughout his tenure, and it could indeed be the case that he legitimately forgot he signed the LNG export pause. But the other frightening possibility is that a Biden staffer used the autopen to enact the pause without the president’s knowledge.

Another explosive report late last year also alleged that Biden aides hid the president’s cognitive decline “from day one” – more evidence supporting the theory that Biden wasn’t really the one running the country. As early as the spring of 2021, White House staffers were rescheduling events to work around Biden’s “good days and bad days.”

While the Oversight Project’s findings are indeed troubling, they don’t definitively prove anything – but they do seem to be grounds to justify further investigation.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has called for just that, submitting an official request to the FBI earlier this month to “conduct a full investigation into President Biden’s mental capacity in his final days in office.”

“It appears staffers and officers in the Biden administration may have exploited Biden’s incapacity so they could issue orders without an accountable President of sound mind approving them,” Bailey continued. “If in fact Biden’s staffers were exploiting his mental decline, those orders are null and void.”

Congress may also have an important role to play in investigating the full extent of Biden’s cognitive decline. With Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress, they have the authority to subpoena former Biden administration officials – both to get accountability for any wrongdoing and ensure that such a gross violation of democratic principles cannot occur in the future.

Democrats and the media love to hang the title of “insurrectionist” around Donald Trump. But it increasingly appears as if the only true insurrection in American history since the Civil War occurred under Joe Biden.

Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.