Former President Joe Biden has admitted that he didn’t manually sign all of the pardons he issued before leaving office in January.
In a softball interview with The New York Times that ran on Sunday, Biden revealed that his staff used an autopen device to replicate his signature on clemency documents due to the large volume.
“I made every decision,” Biden told the leftist outlet. Defending the use of the autopen, he added that “we’re talking about a whole lot of people.”
The one-term president’s admission comes as the Trump-era White House, the DOJ and Congress launch separate investigations into the legitimacy of the pardons. Some experts argue are illegitimate because they were never physically signed by Biden.
Biden downplayed Trump’s concerns about the potential abuse of the autopen in remarks to The Times: “I understand why Trump would think that, because obviously, I guess, he doesn’t focus much. Anyway, so — yes, I made every decision.”
Emails turned over by the National Archives show then–Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, not Biden, authorizing the autopen.
“I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons,” Zients wrote in one exchange, according to the outlet.
Former White House staff secretary Stefanie Feldman managed the process. She reportedly ran the clemency documents through a device and receive “blurbs” claiming Biden had approved them.
Responding to concerns that he was incapacitated and that aides exploited the autopen, Biden shot back:
“They’re liars. They know it. They know, for certain. I mean, this is — look, what they, they’ve had a pretty good thing going here. They’ve done so badly.”
Biden defended the pre-emptive pardons for his family when asked, claiming without evidence that Trump would have launched vindictive criminal investigations against them.
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