DANIEL VAUGHAN: Biden's Autopen Use Is The Scandal In D.C.

By 
 July 16, 2025

The White House is joining the fray into Joe Biden's use of the autopen. Biden himself poured gasoline on that topic by giving a bizarre brief interview with The New York Times. Whatever the truth is, we're getting to the bottom of it whether the Biden family wants that or not. Where we go after that is new territory for the nation.

There are two big questions on Biden's use of the autopen. The first question is a factual one, and the second is a legal question. The White House, Congress, and other investigations aim to answer the factual question: Did Biden's staff use the autopen in a manner that Biden was physically or mentally incapable of understanding?

Congress is in the process of forcing Biden aides to testify. The Trump administration is waiving executive privilege to advance the testimony.

According to The Daily Mail, "The investigation is to be conducted by the White House counsel's office. A senior administration official told Fox News that the probe is anticipating a review of up to one million documents."

In short, everything Biden signed is at issue. Everyone focuses on the pardons, but a President's signature impacts many other things. The chief example here comes from Congress.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, still new to the position, met with Biden and challenged him on an order. The New York Post reports:

The troubling encounter happened in the Oval Office in early 2024 when the two met to discuss the latest aid package for Ukraine. Afterwards, Johnson asked Biden why he had inked an executive order pausing new permits for American liquid natural gas export to European allies — a crucial issue for his constituents in the Bayou State, which in 2023, handled 61% of the nation's LNG exports, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

When Johnson asked about the order, Biden denied ever having signed it. Johnson was floored, and Biden insisted he'd never signed the order. It left Johnson shaken as he watched the war in Ukraine unfold.

Was that a real executive order? Did Biden's staff sign that without his knowledge, or was Biden's memory so bad at that stage that he was simply incapacitated?

Biden insists that he "made every decision." He called The New York Times and gave them the first interview in five years; he skipped them throughout his entire presidency. The Times was reporting on the use of AutoPen, and Biden quickly jumped to set the narrative.

However, "when it came to large groups of people, he did not individually approve the names of every single person he pardoned during his final months in the White House. Instead, he signed off on the criteria and standards he wanted to be used to determine which criminals received reduced sentences."

Again, though, the focus is beyond pardon and clemency decisions. Was Biden so incapacitated that his staff, or family, using the AutoPen to get what they wanted at any time? If true, and there are indications it could be true, then this becomes a monumental scandal. You can only point to one other president like that, and it's Woodrow Wilson, who was essentially incapacitated while his wife ran things.

The White House and congressional investigations will get to the bottom of this. The question after that is much more complicated: then what? 

It is unclear whether a president's pardon power can be challenged. The president delegating things isn't a problem. We expect that to happen, and no one expects a wet ink signature on everything in modern times. It's a digital world, and we expect digital answers. 

But if Biden was so incapacitated that he was unaware of what was being signed, or things were being signed without his knowledge, that change matters. Factually, Republicans could argue before any court that the signature is fraud and should be treated as null and void.

If that seal is broken, the entire legacy of the Biden White House implodes. They can likely prove he was aware of some or most things of the autopen. However, if Republicans can prove even one instance of a null and void signature, this becomes a scandal bigger than Watergate. 

Americans elect a president. If the president were not the one making decisions and signing documents, that would undermine the entire system we have built. Validating Biden's use of the autopen when he couldn't even string together a sentence in a debate is a vital task. 

Democrats spent years talking about how no one was above the law. The shoe is on the other foot now. If they believe that, the time to stand up for the rule of law is now. There are hard questions to be asked about the Biden administration, and it impacts laws in place right now.

The country demands an answer.

" A free people [claim] their rights, as derived from the laws of nature."
Thomas Jefferson