The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a 100-page report Tuesday with the damning title, “The Biden Autopen Presidency: Decline, Delusion, and Deception in the White House.”
It details former President Joe Biden’s diminishing mental and physical abilities, the implications of that decline, and Biden’s “inner circle of loyalists attempting to mislead the nation to ignore what people’s eyes plainly showed them,” the report reads.
The committee, led by Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., found that Biden White House officials exercised the authority of the former president and intentionally concealed Biden’s “rapidly worsening mental and physical state.”
White House staff took shortcuts and took actions to keep the Biden presidency afloat, the committee found, and the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline “left no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him.”
With the help of the autopen and a loose chain-of-command, Biden’s staff moved policies and executive actions that “lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized,” the report reads.
As the American people grew more concerned about Biden’s ability to do the job, care should have been taken to document his decisions so if it was ever questioned the administration could prove Biden made the final decisions. But that did not happen. The clemency issued at the end of Biden’s term lacked decision memos, and it appears Biden may not have known about the violent criminal backgrounds of the people who received clemency by autopen.
Just how sloppy was the autopen use? Consider the example of the pardons signed on January 19, 2025, including pardons for Hunter Biden and other members of Joe Biden’s family. The signature came after an in-person meeting in the final hours of the presidency, for which there is no documentation. The report’s description of the signing process for these pardons involving Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, reads:
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. 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 “approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons. Thanks, JZ.”
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 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.”
The committee notes that it is clear Biden was, “losing command of himself” and his executive actions, especially the pardons, cannot be deemed his own. The committee has asked the DOJ to investigate all of Biden’s executive actions to assess whether some should be voided.
Key Findings
The report is summed up in the following key findings:
- There was no proper chain of custody for the documents which predicated President Biden’s executive actions, and a cohort of people, including residence staff, had access to them.
- President Biden allegedly made some executive decisions verbally, and without documentation indicating that they came from the president himself or that he understood the decisions completely.
- Senior White House officials did not know who operated the autopen and its use was not sufficiently controlled or documented to prevent abuse.
- In contrast to President Trump’s staff secretary, Will Scharf — who is highly visible in carrying out his duties to ensure President Trump’s signature makes it on the executive decisions President Trump approves — President Biden’s staff secretary, Neera Tanden, only saw the former president every six to eight weeks.
- Biden White House staff may have ignored internal Biden Administration recommendations that President Biden hand-sign pardons and other documents.
- Zients testified that President Biden included his son, Hunter Biden, in the decision-making process for and meetings about pardons. This apparently included the meeting to discuss the pardons of five Biden family members, Dr. Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley, and the members of congress who served on the Select Subcommittee to Investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol, and their staff.
- The Biden DOJ’s own attorneys raised serious concerns about the pardon review process and President Biden’s awareness of the violent criminal records of clemency recipients.
- The Biden White House’s process of ascertaining the president’s approval for decisions and use of the autopen was inconsistent, poorly documented, and vulnerable to abuse.
- In the absence of sufficiently robust decision-making procedures or documentation to ascertain it, DOJ must investigate all executive actions taken during the Biden Administration to determine if they were properly authorized by President Biden himself.
Stage-Managed Presidency
In addition to using the auto pen, Biden’s staff, under the direction of his inner circle, “went to great lengths to prop up the former president as he began losing the ability to independently function in office,” the report reads. “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 committee’s investigation revealed.
The committee reported that during its investigation, elected Democrats and staff have tried to minimize or deny that President Biden is in mental decline, and it had sharp words for anyone peddling such claims.
“President Biden’s cognitive decline was apparent to any person who watched him interact with the press, the public, or world leaders for years as president. Assertions made to the contrary are nothing less than gaslighting,” the report said.
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