A House panel said that pardons issued by the Biden White House while autopen usage was running rampant are invalid and is calling for a Department of Justice to review who signed what and why for possible criminal actions.
The panel issued a report — entitled “The Biden Autopen Presidency: Decline, Delusion, and Deception in the White House” — that “exposes how President Joe Biden’s top advisors, political operatives, and personal physician concealed the President’s mental and physical decline from the American people,” according to a news release on the website of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The release said that as “President Biden’s condition deteriorated, his aides exercised presidential authority and facilitated executive actions without his direct authorization, including misusing the autopen and failing to properly document decision-making processes.”
Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, who chairs the panel, has written a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi calling for an investigation of Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Annie Tomasini, and Anthony Bernal who refused to answer the committee’s questions on their actions to prevent the American people form learning the truth about former President Joe Biden’s decline.
“The Biden Autopen Presidency will go down as one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history. As Americans saw President Biden’s decline with their own eyes, Biden’s inner circle sought to deceive the public, cover-up his decline, and took unauthorized executive actions with the autopen that are now invalid,” Comer said.
“Our report reveals how key aides colluded to mislead the public and the extraordinary measures they took to sustain the appearance of presidential authority as Biden’s capacity to function independently diminished. Executive actions performed by Biden White House staff and signed by autopen are null and void.”
“We have provided Americans with transparency about the Biden Autopen Presidency, and now there must be accountability,” he concluded.
In summing up the report, the release said, the panel “found substantial evidence that President Joe Biden experienced significant mental and physical decline during his presidency, while senior White House officials actively sought to conceal his deterioration from the public.”
“As President Biden declined, his staff abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy to effect executive actions that lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized. While President Biden became progressively less able to do his job—when every measure should have been taken to document and, if ever questioned, prove that President Biden had made final decisions—White House staff took shortcuts and ad hoc actions to keep the Biden presidency afloat,” the report said.
Will the DOJ follow through on the findings of this report?
“The Committee has found that there was, in fact, a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline and that there is no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him.”
The report said, “Biden officials — at the behest of the inner circle — went to great lengths to prop up the former president as he began losing the ability to independently function in office.”
“These steps ranged from addressing President Biden’s makeup, clothing, schedule, the number of steps President Biden could walk or climb, the amount of time President Biden needed to read and to spend with his family, working to ‘meticulously stage-manage’ President Biden, limiting the number of events he participated in, lightening the president’s workload, making it difficult even for senior Democrats to access the president, keeping cabinet meetings to a minimum, eliciting ‘direction’ from Hollywood on the State of the Union and other events, and using teleprompters even at small, intimate events,” the report explained.
The report honed in on the Jan. 19, 2025 pardons Biden doled out to family members and political allies, noting that an aide to former White House chief of staff Jeff Zients played a key role in the process.
“Instead of actual documentation, the decision to grant these pardons was allegedly communicated second-hand to a Zients aide, Rosa Po, who then called Zients, who verbally authorized the use of the autopen from home; Zients did not even know who actually used the autopen to apply the signature after his aide, using his email account with his permission, communicated that the autopen was authorized for the clemency actions,” the report said.
“Zients did so without confirming with President Biden that he had, in fact, granted these pardons after repeatedly telling the American people he would not pardon his son, Hunter, let alone the five other members of the Biden family in the waning hours of his presidency. Po subsequently sent an email on Zients’s behalf stating ‘I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons. Thanks, JZ,’” the report continued.
“In light of the former president’s cognitive deterioration and the cover-up from his inner circle, this ‘approval’ process calls into question the validity of all pardons reportedly granted by President Biden throughout his tenure. The Committee deems void all executive actions signed by the autopen without proper, corresponding, contemporaneous, written approval traceable to the president’s own consent.”
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