I think we’re on safe ground to say that we now know former President Joe Biden was not in any sort of fit mental state during his final year in office, and likely long before that. This is beyond dispute.
On Friday, we had the audio from Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur leak; if you haven’t listened to it, it’s devastating, since it depicts a man much farther gone mentally than the transcripts of the interview did, and the transcripts were already bad.
On Tuesday, the most thorough look into Biden’s mental deterioration — “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson — was released, confirming that even before his 2020 presidential run, serious questions about his mental capacity existed, and an inner circle of trusted staffers not only protected him but effectively made important decisions for him.
This all raises the question, then: What about everything signed with the autopen — the electronic device used to affix the president’s signature to documents he’s approved but will not personally put his John Hancock on — during the final years of Biden’s presidency?
Tennessee GOP Rep. Tim Burchett would certainly like some answers about that, particularly health
For those of you who don’t recall, Biden’s list of pardons and grants of clemency were extraordinarily broad. In addition to pardoning his own son, Hunter Biden — who he said he absolutely wouldn’t pardon after his convictions on felony charges — his White House publicly advertised that the president went on the “largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history” in December 2024, then preemptively pardoned controversial Biden-era figures like former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark Milley, and others.
Among those receiving pardons or clemency included a Pennsylvania judge who sold minors into for-profit prisons as part of a bribery scheme and multiple murderers.
Appearing on the podcast of Turning Point USA’s Benny Thompson talking about the autopen and Biden’s diminished state during his final years in office — particularly in light of a Stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis announced Sunday which, ahem, sounded quite dodgy given the details of how the disease was supposedly discovered and what the progression of the disease generally entails — Burchett said he feared, given events, that we’d find staffers had stashed “a quarter of a mil in some safety deposit box” in exchange for autopen pardons they could basically get through with little to no oversight from a barely functional executive.
“The matter will be decided in the courts, but I’m sure we’ll write somebody a strong letter,” Burchett said about the constitutionality of Biden’s actions late in his term.
Was the autopen being used to forge Biden’s signature?
Burchett then went on to note that, when it came to selling pardons, “Tennessee has had a history of this; we had a governor … he sold pardons. You can look it up. His name is Ray Blanton. It made national news.”
Indeed it did; Blanton’s staff reportedly took hundreds of thousands of dollars for commutations and pardons after he took office in 1975, including one for a convicted murderer who was in prison for 20 to 40 years but was out on work release, according to a 2023 retrospective on the scandal from WVLT in Knoxville, Tennessee.
One Nashville TV anchor who broke the story recalled interviewing him about it: “I say to Blanton, ‘He’s a convicted double murderer.’ And he said, ‘Well, he hasn’t killed anybody since he got out of prison.’” Lovely. Blanton didn’t run for re-election in 1978 and was convicted in 1984 for mail fraud and extortion on unrelated matters; he served 22 months in prison and died in 1996.
The difference between Blanton and Biden, of course, is that Blanton was in his right mind, just a criminal one, whereas Biden’s mind — being effectively gone, at least for the level of cognition required for the job he was elected to do — was outsourced, wherein the problem lies.
However, the “cash for clemency” regime of Blanton is, according to Burchett, “exactly what I think you’re going to find out” with the autopen pardon/clemency spree Biden went on in his final days in office.
“You’re going to find staffers that were able to take forms, get them, and run them through some sort of bogus legal system, and then they autopenned them,” Burchett said.
“And there’s people out on the street that shouldn’t be, but somebody got rich off that. And I think those people — I hate to say it, but you’ll see something probably horrible happen to some of those people because it goes up the chain. This is a very dangerous town to play games in.”
Asked to elaborate further, Burchett noted: “I have no direct proof of that, but I’m just talking about history. You’ve got somebody making $100,000 a year, and somebody offers you a quarter of a mil in some safety deposit box … yeah.”
Burchett shook his head in dismay — as, indeed, we all would at the prospect:
BREAKING: @RepTimBurchett says Autopen staffers were taking MASSIVE payoffs in exchange for pardons.
This should be considered TREASONOUS.
“Someone got rich.” pic.twitter.com/WH6728YNUg
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) May 20, 2025
Now again, as the kids like to say: Big if true. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and while very unusual coincidences can be pointed out — as Burchett is doing here — they are just that until the extraordinary evidence emerges: very unusual coincidences.
That said, we have extraordinary (and overwhelming) evidence that massive subterfuge was necessary by a core group of individuals to convince the American people of something that wasn’t true: that we had a functional president during Biden’s term in office. We also know that he was especially non-functional at the end, yet was going on what even his own White House was advertising as the biggest clemency spree in the history of our republic.
If Steve Ricchetti had taken down the stars and stripes and hoisted a giant crimson standard in its stead at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, there couldn’t be a bigger red flag coming from of the White House regarding these autopen pardons and clemencies.
Knowing what we now know, it’s impossible to look into everything that happened in the four years of the Biden presidency. However, the possibility that the former president’s numerous infirmities combined with the authority of the autopen turned the White House into Ray Blanton 2.0 in the administration’s final days is one that can’t be ignored. Attention must be paid, and not just by Rep. Burchett.
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