Former President Joe Biden’s final days in office have sparked a firestorm over the use of a robotic signature machine to ink thousands of pardons.
The crux of the matter is this: Biden, in his waning hours as president, issued a staggering number of preemptive pardons, including high-profile ones, with an autopen—a device that mimics a signature—while current President Donald Trump calls foul, alleging Biden was out of the loop on what he was signing, Fox News reported.
Let’s rewind to Biden’s last day in the Oval Office on January 19, 2025, when he huddled with aides until nearly 10 p.m. to hash out these controversial pardons. Aides scrambled, with emails flying to Chief of Staff Jeff Zients’ assistant by 10:03 p.m., summarizing the late-night decisions.
By 10:28 p.m., Zients’ team sought his green light, alongside Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed, for the autopen’s deployment. Just three minutes later, at 10:31 p.m., Zients gave the nod, approving the machine to sign off on pardons for heavyweights like Anthony Fauci and Gen. Mark Milley.
The New York Times directly quoted Zients saying, “I approve the use,” in reference to the autopen for these acts of clemency. But let’s be real—having a machine approve something as weighty as a pardon raises eyebrows about accountability in the executive branch.
Biden didn’t personally vet each name on the pardon list. Instead, he approved broad criteria for sentence reductions and delegated the specific decisions to others. That choice places a lot of trust in a system already under scrutiny.
Over his term, Biden granted a whopping 4,245 acts of clemency, with 96% squeezed into his final months between October 2024 and January 2025. That’s a flurry of forgiveness that smells more like a political maneuver than a measured decision.
Fast forward to March 2025, when Trump first pointed fingers, accusing Biden of using an autopen for critical documents. By June, Trump upped the ante, issuing a memo to Attorney General Pam Bondi to dig into whether this stemmed from Biden’s mental sharpness—or lack thereof.
Trump didn’t mince words, calling it “one of the biggest scandals” in decades to White House reporters. But while the outrage is palpable, one wonders if this is less about principle and more about settling old scores.
Interestingly, Trump admitted to using an autopen himself for letters, though a White House official clarified he signs binding documents by hand. That’s a convenient distinction when you’re pointing fingers, isn’t it?
Trump’s memo to Bondi further blasted the situation as a “dangerous scandal,” alleging Biden’s aides hid cognitive decline through autopen abuse. While the claim is explosive, it’s hard to ignore the political theater at play here—both sides have axes to grind.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields doubled down in an email to Fox News, accusing Biden’s team of a massive “cover-up scheme.” Such strong language fuels conservative distrust, though it risks overshadowing the need for a sober investigation into executive overreach.
Fields also claimed Biden “lied through his teeth” to Americans for years. Hyperbole aside, the deeper issue is whether the public was misled about who truly held the reins of power in those final days.
At its core, this debacle isn’t just about a machine signing papers—it’s about trust in our institutions. If a president’s signature can be automated for something as profound as a pardon, what’s stopping broader misuse of executive authority? Conservatives, and frankly all Americans, deserve clarity on whether this was a bureaucratic shortcut or something more sinister.
