GOP-led Oversight Committee says Biden pardons signed by autopen are ‘void’ in final report
By Jake Tapper, Annie Grayer, CNN
(CNN) — Former President Joe Biden experienced such “cognitive decline” while in office that it remains a serious question as to whether he was aware of the substance of the various pardons and commutations signed in his name via autopen, the GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee asserted in a letter it sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi, urging her to consider whether that clemency might be invalid and to take action for potential prosecution against some of Biden’s aides.
The committee “deems void President Biden’s executive actions that were signed using the Autopen, and the committee determines that action by the Department of Justice is warranted to address the legal consequences of that determination,” it wrote to Bondi in the letter released Tuesday morning.
The letter was made public alongside a 93-page report outlining the committee’s conclusions from its months-long investigation into Biden’s use of the autopen. It alleged the committee had found “a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline” and “no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him.”
Biden has publicly disputed that, saying he made all decisions as president and calling Republicans who have suggested otherwise “liars.”
To support its assertions, the committee report includes excerpts of interviews with 14 former senior Biden aides, and it released transcripts and video later Tuesday morning. Although the committee raised serious questions about the Biden administration’s process for awarding pardons, it did not cite any direct evidence that anyone other than Biden made the decisions that his staff later put into effect. Instead, the committee pointed to a lack of clear records indicating that Biden was the decision-maker. The panel did not subpoena Biden to testify in the probe.
Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking member on the House Oversight committee, called the report a “sham investigation” in a statement, adding that “every White House official testified President Biden fully executed his duties as President of the United States.”
“The testimonies also make it clear the former President authorized every executive order, pardon, and use of the autopen,” Garcia said while calling on House Republicans to reopen the government.
In their interviews, Biden aides defended the process they had in place for using the autopen and stated firmly that Biden made his own decisions.
Republicans have long raised questions about Biden’s mental state, but in releasing the report, the GOP-led committee seemed to suggest a path for continued impacts of its work.
The letter specifically asked that the Justice Department further investigate three top Biden White House aides who invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify to the committee: former White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor, and Biden aides Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini.
Invoking the Fifth Amendment is typically done to avoid answering specific questions. Though it can be perceived by the public as a way of avoiding accountability, the US Supreme Court has long regarded the right against self-incrimination as a venerable part of the Constitution and, in legal proceedings, tried to ensure that a witness’ silence not be viewed as evidence of guilt.
The Committee also wrote to the Board of Medicine for Washington, DC, requesting that it investigate whether O’Connor should be disciplined in any manner for “issuing misleading medical reports, misrepresenting treatments, failing to conform to standards of practice, or other acts of violation of District of Columbia law regulating licensed physicians.”
Former Biden chief of staff Jeff Zients told the committee that after Biden’s disastrous debate performance last year, he recommended O’Connor conduct a full medical workup, including a cognitive exam, and O’Connor said he would take the suggestion under advisement.
CNN has reached out to O’Connor, Bernal, Tomasini, Zients, and former staffer Bruce Reed. A Biden spokesperson said, “This investigation into baseless claims has confirmed what has been clear from the start: President Biden made the decisions of his presidency.”
“There was no conspiracy, no cover-up, and no wrongdoing. Congressional Republicans should stop focusing on political retribution and instead work to end the government shutdown,” the spokesperson said.
The book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” co-authored by CNN’s Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson, documented how Biden, his closest aides and his family forged ahead with the former president’s doomed 2024 reelection bid despite signs of his physical and mental decline.
“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,” said Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer, the committee’s chairman, said in a statement that called for accountability.
The committee’s assertion that Bondi seek to act on their declaration of Biden’s actions as “void” suggested they were exploring legal ways to undo his grants of clemency. Such a move would likely face significant legal challenges; there is no mechanism or precedent to reverse a pardon issued by a past president, legal experts say. In 2005, during the second Bush administration, the Justice Department looked at the legality of a president’s use of the autopen and endorsed it – so long as the decision came from the president.
Still, Trump administration officials appeared to be contemplating a world in which the pardons would be invalidated. In a Monday email CNN obtained from a source, the Trump-installed Pardon Attorney at the Justice Department, Ed Martin, told Comer that his “ongoing investigation” of the way that pardons and commutations were issued during Biden’s presidency had revealed “abuses” of the process by “political actors.” He wrote that his office would not defend any of the acts of clemency “without further investigation.”
“My office cannot support the validity of AutoPen pardons for individuals such as Anthony Fauci, Adam Schiff, Mark Milley, and many more without further examination and fact-finding,” he wrote.
In a post on X, Bondi said her team was “reviewing the Biden administration’s reported use of autopen for pardons,” and that she looked forward to working alongside the Oversight Committee “to deliver accountability for the American people.”
Even before the committee’s action, the Justice Department and the White House had been looking into Biden’s use of the autopen, which had long been a fixation of President Donald Trump.
CNN reported in May that Martin, who also heads the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group to look into whether alleged efforts by the previous administrations to improperly use the levers of government, had been examining Biden’s past pardons.
In June, Trump issued an executive order instructing Bondi and the White House counsel to conduct “an investigation into who ran the United States while President Biden was in office,” as well as Biden’s use of an autopen for important orders. That probe was to include “who authorized its use, and the validity of the resulting Presidential policy decisions.”
The Biden camp responded to the executive order with a written statement calling Trump’s assertions “ridiculous and false.” “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation and proclamations,” the statement said.
Biden then spoke to New York Times reporters on the phone, telling the newspaper in a 10-minute interview that he “made every decision” and pardoned people proactively so they would not face costly Justice Department investigations when Trump took over.
“Everybody knows how vindictive he is, so we knew that they’d do what they’re doing now,” Biden told The Times at the time, adding, “I consciously made all those decisions.”
As president, Biden issued pardons and commutations to 4,245 people – more acts of clemency than any other president. Perhaps most controversially, he preemptively pardoned prominent Trump critics and members of his own family, including his son who was convicted of federal tax-related charges, fearing they might be targeted for retribution when Trump took office for a second time.
“These are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing,” Biden wrote at the time in a statement about the initial batch of pardons, issued hours before he was set to welcome Trump to the White House for tea before attending his swearing-in. “Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety and financial security of targeted individuals and their families.”
A focus on Biden’s pardon process
The final section of the report sought to outline issues with Biden’s use of the autopen.
While former staffers like Reed said the Biden administration’s practice for pardons was like “the prior two administrations” for whom he served, the House Oversight Committee raised questions about how the pardons were implemented.
The committee focused specifically on the lack of documentation around a key in-person meeting where the pardons for Biden’s family, Dr. Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley and members of the January 6 Committee were allegedly finalized.
The pardons were conveyed by a “game of telephone,” the committee said. The report noted Biden’s decision was conveyed by Reed and White House Counsel Ed Siskel to Rosa Po, an aide to White House chief of staff Jeff Zients. From there, Po called Zients, Zients authorized Po to send an email authorizing the use of autopen to sign the pardons, and Po sent the email to the staff secretary’s office, who then told someone to use the autopen for pardons.
“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 stated, deeming “void” every executive action signed by the Joe Biden autopen “without proper, corresponding, contemporaneous, written approval traceable to the president’s own consent.”
The panel’s final report highlighted former Biden White House staffers’ testimony in which they expressed degrees of confusion about the decision-making process.
Former White House Staff Secretary Neera Tanden, who was responsible for managing paper flow to the president, told committee investigators that she didn’t know what happened to the decision book between when she gave the materials to the Oval Office operations team and received it back with Biden’s signature, the report alleges. Zients said in another excerpt that he did not know who actually operated the autopen and shared that Hunter Biden did take part in some of the pardon discussions. And former White House chief of staff Ron Klain testified during one portion of his interview that Biden made some executive decisions “orally,” but the excerpt didn’t address whether that pertained to pardon decisions.
“The Biden White House’s executive decision-making procedures were so lax that the chain of custody for a given decision is difficult or impossible to establish,” the panel wrote. “Documents that were used to predicate executive actions should be sufficiently traceable to ensure they reflect the will of the president. Instead, the Biden White House’s flimsy procedure appears to have been extremely vulnerable to abuse.”
The aides, though, insisted to House Oversight investigators that Biden was making the calls. Tanden said there were never any executive orders auto-penned based solely on a senior advisor’s request. She said she never authorized the use of the autopen without a signature card from the former president.
“I sometimes have a reputation for toughness, and I always require the signature card,” Tanden said, according to a transcript.
Klain said, “We used the same process that I thought prior presidents had used.”
And Zients emphasized that the picture that Republicans were trying to paint about the pardon process was not accurate.
“I don’t want you to miss the rigor and the amount of iterations, the amount of time the president spent on pardons. He made these decisions, obviously, but he also made these decisions after, in most cases, many, many meetings,” Zients said.
According to Pew Research, 96% of Biden’s acts of clemency were in the last three months and 20 days of his presidency. The then-president declared the commutations were going to “non violent” drug offenders, but according to Justice Department emails obtained by the committee, Justice Department ethics attorney Bradley Weinsheimer wrote to Biden White House staff: “I think you should stop saying that because it is untrue or at least misleading.”
With little time to vet the list of those to receive commutation, Weinsheimer wrote that he and his team identified “19 that were highly problematic,” 16 of whom Biden granted clemency, including “violent offenders, including those who committed acts of violence during the offense of conviction, or who otherwise have a history of violence…” For example, Marvin Gabrion, whose death sentence Biden commuted in favor of a term of life in prison, was convicted of kidnapping and murdering 19-year-old Rachel Timmerman and her 11-month-old daughter two days before he was scheduled to be tried on rape charges.
“I have no idea if the president was aware of these backgrounds when making clemency decisions,” Weinsheimer wrote.
In his email to Comer suggesting he would not defend previous Biden pardons, Martin noted Weinsheimer’s message.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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CNN’s Arlette Saenz and Hannah Rabinowitz contributed to this report.
