President Donald Trump claimed some of former President Joe Biden’s pardons are invalid because Biden used an autopen.
“The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Trump wrote March 17 on Truth Social. He referred to Biden’s pardons of congressional members who served on the committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack.
It’s uncertain to us whether Biden used an “autopen” — a mechanical device that uses a robotic arm with a pen attached — to sign the pardons. Yet, Trump also claimed that Biden “did not sign” the pardons and “did not know anything about them!”
Trump’s post followed his statements days earlier criticizing Biden’s use of the autopen.
“Everything was signed by autopen — almost everything,” Trump said March 13. “Nobody has ever heard of such a thing.”
Biden is not the first U.S. president to use an autopen. Presidents Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy and Thomas Jefferson used autopens or mechanized signing devices.
We found universal agreement among legal scholars that the Constitution doesn’t require a pardon’s direct human signing, and subsequent judicial decisions and legal memoranda support an autopen’s use for similar purposes. Legal scholars also agreed that there is no constitutional mechanism to overturn pardons once granted.
A White House press office...
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