A House committee has raised concerns over the validity of pardons issued by the Biden administration, citing rampant use of the autopen during the former president's tenure.
The committee is urging the Department of Justice to investigate who authorized these pardons and why, suggesting potential criminal implications.
According to the Western Journal, the committee released a report titled "The Biden Autopen Presidency: Decline, Delusion, and Deception in the White House." The report alleges that President Joe Biden's top advisors, political operatives, and personal physician concealed his mental and physical decline from the American public.
The committee claims that as Biden's condition worsened, his aides exercised presidential authority and facilitated executive actions without his direct authorization, including misuse of the autopen and failure to properly document decision-making processes.
Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the committee's chair, has penned a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, calling for an investigation into Dr. Kevin O'Connor, Annie Tomasini, and Anthony Bernal. These individuals allegedly refused to answer the committee's questions about their actions to prevent the American public from learning the truth about Biden's decline.
"The Biden Autopen Presidency will go down as one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history," Comer stated. "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 further emphasized that the report reveals how key aides colluded to mislead the public and took extraordinary measures to maintain the appearance of presidential authority as Biden's capacity to function independently diminished. He declared that executive actions performed by Biden's 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," Comer stated.
The committee's report alleges that there is substantial evidence that President Biden experienced significant mental and physical decline during his presidency. It further claims that senior White House officials actively sought to conceal his deterioration from the public. The report suggests that as Biden's capacity diminished, 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.
The report also alleges that Biden's officials went to great lengths to prop up the former president as he began losing the ability to independently function in office. These measures ranged from managing Biden's appearance and schedule to limiting his workload and access to senior Democrats.
The report specifically highlights the pardons Biden issued on Jan. 19, 2025, to family members and political allies. It notes that an aide to former White House chief of staff Jeff Zients played a key role in the process. The committee alleges that the decision to grant these pardons was communicated second-hand to a Zients aide, Rosa Po, who then called Zients, who verbally authorized the use of the autopen from home.
The report concludes by questioning the validity of all pardons reportedly granted by President Biden throughout his tenure, given the former president's cognitive deterioration and the alleged cover-up by his inner circle. The committee deems all executive actions signed by the autopen without proper, corresponding, contemporaneous, written approval traceable to the president's own consent as void.
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