Former President Joe Biden has dropped a bombshell about how he handled pardons in his final months. It turns out he didn’t personally sign off on every name in those sweeping clemency batches.
According to Breitbart, Biden confessed to the New York Times that he relied on an autopen to issue pardons to large groups of criminals. Instead of reviewing each case, he set broad criteria and let his staff handle the rest.
This startling admission raises eyebrows about accountability in the executive branch. If a president can delegate such a weighty power to a machine and a handful of aides, what does that say about the integrity of the process?
In the closing months of his term, Biden rolled out four major pardon sets, three of which applied to wide categories of individuals. The Times reported this move on Sunday, highlighting how little direct oversight Biden exercised.
He didn’t scrutinize each name for these categorical pardons, as he and his team confirmed. Biden decided on the standards for who would qualify for sentence reductions after lengthy discussions with advisers.
Yet even after he set those guidelines, a former aide revealed that the Bureau of Prisons kept tweaking the list with new inmate data. Rather than bothering Biden with updated signatures, staff simply ran the final version through the autopen, treating it as standard practice.
Emails reviewed by the Times show that Stefanie Feldman, then White House staff secretary, oversaw the autopen process. Biden would lay out his criteria in meetings with top brass like Chief of Staff Jeffrey Zients and counsel Ed Siskel.
Those senior advisers then passed his instructions down to assistants, who drafted summaries for review by Zients, Siskel, and others present. Feldman insisted on written records of Biden’s directives for clarity and documentation.
On January 19, the day before Biden exited office, Zients himself approved a last-minute draft summary via email. Minutes after receiving the request, he replied to all with a clear endorsement of using the autopen for the pardons.
Zients’ email, as quoted by the Times, read, “I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons.” Such a casual sign-off on a profound act of mercy begs the question of who truly held the reins.
This isn’t just a procedural quirk; it fuels doubts about the legitimacy of these pardons. When a machine stamps out clemency like a factory line, it risks eroding trust in a power meant to reflect careful judgment.
Public scrutiny is already intense over Biden’s mental sharpness during his presidency. Adding this autopen controversy to the mix only deepens concerns about whether critical decisions were made with the gravity they deserve.
These revelations aren’t merely about one man’s tenure; they set a dangerous example for future administrations. If pardons can be mass-produced with minimal presidential input, the system becomes ripe for abuse or negligence.
Biden’s team might argue this was efficiency, a way to manage an overwhelming workload. But efficiency at the cost of accountability is a trade-off that undermines the very purpose of executive clemency.
As questions swirl, it’s clear this issue won’t fade quietly. The American public deserves transparency on how such profound decisions are made, lest the pardon power become just another bureaucratic checkbox.
