The Autopen Presidency Controversy Is Just Beginning

Authored by Michael Thielen via RealClearPolitics.com,

Now that investigations into the autopen presidency are underway, left-leaning media and Democratic politicians are finally confronted with the truth that was right in front of our faces for years: Joe Biden was not running the country, and America was being led by an unelected, unaccountable polit-bureau.

Every week we learn more that makes the long national nightmare we endured even worse. Now, thanks to the New York Times, of all places, we learn that Joe Biden couldn’t even manage the task of signing his own name on pardons of violent and dangerous criminals, and at best, only knew of categories of those being pardoned.

President Biden was forced to bow out of his campaign after he embarrassed the political class and media elite during that fateful June 27 debate with Donald Trump – but he was NOT forced to resign from the most powerful office on Planet Earth.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer announced at the Republican National Lawyers Association policy conference in May that he was determined to conduct full investigations to get to the truth for the American people.

Thankfully, Comer is making good on his promise – but it’s not going to be easy.

On July 9, after the Trump administration released the Biden family doctor from the burden of executive privilege, Dr. Kevin O’Connor began the trend of refusing to answer the Oversight Committee’s questions and chose to plead the Fifth Amendment, presumably to protect himself from criminal self-incrimination.

Chairman Comer declares he will “continue to interview more Biden White House aides to get the answers Americans deserve,” and with former press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre announcing her own forthcoming book on the heels of “Original Sin” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, it’s expected that more will come out that further confirms Biden’s mental and cognitive incapacity.

Some legal experts have agreed that an autopen signature could be legal, but we never seriously considered signing laws using the autopen until Barack Obama signed Patriot Act extensions while he was in France in 2011. Obama left congressional Republicans questioning the validity of such use when he again used an autopen to sign the 2013 “fiscal cliff” legislation during one of his Hawaii vacations.

Obama knew what was being signed. But in January 2025, Speaker Mike Johnson revealed to journalist Bari Weiss on her podcast, “Honestly”, that President Biden “has not been in charge for some time,” after confronting Biden about why he paused LNG exports to Europe, only to hear Biden say, “I didn’t do that.”

Biden didn’t know what he had signed into law. How many other times did he not know what he was signing? Was anything signed into law that he would not have authorized if he were “with it”? Are any remaining executive orders that Trump hasn’t overturned still valid?

Should we examine all legislation that wasn’t signed into law during a signing ceremony?

An even stronger case be made for the more personal decisions of  pardons or commutations. Biden did sign the pardon of his son Hunter, and clearly knew about that pardon from interviews. But if Biden was compos mentis, why did the staff hide other pardons, or at least the details, from him? It is an open legal question whether and how such pardons could be revoked.  

But Biden’s staff did not just keep the president in the dark, they pushed the limits of the pardon power itself. The Biden administration used the pardon to pre-emptively pardon someone who hadn’t yet been accused of a crime.

Sen. Rand Paul has been trying for years to get to the bottom of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s gain-of-function research and cover-up behavior before and during the COVID outbreak, but the Biden staff’s preemptive pardon stopped that referral. Now, Sen. Paul has re-referred Dr. Fauci for criminal investigation. The fact that Biden may not have known, in addition to the pre-emptive nature of the pardon, could lead to that referral going forward. Dr. Fauci could finally face the music, and the public get justice for his actions.

The autopen reveals the importance of the 25th Amendment and why it needed to be invoked last year. At a minimum, we need to have a serious conversation about the 25th Amendment and why it was not used when the whole world saw Joe Biden for the severely impaired patient he was on that debate stage. If the DNC did not trust Joe Biden to be up for campaigning for reelection, why did they trust him to remain in the White House?

When “experts” declare use of the autopen legal based on it being a symbolic act of approval, they assume Biden was aware of what he was signing, understood the implications, and agreed to the intended outcome.

This scandal is not merely about the legality of the autopen on documents that have the force of law.

We have a real predicament because we didn’t treat seriously the mental acuity of the man whose signature was hijacked for political ideology and personal gain.

No one believes Joe Biden was “all there” at the end of his presidency. If he was too senile for Democrats to let him run for president, it seems likely he was too senile for White House staff to let him run the country.