In the latest turn in the ongoing revenge fantasy that is Donald Trump’s second administration, on Wednesday the president issued a memorandum, instructing the Department of Justice to investigate President Biden’s use of the autopen. The tool is basically a tiny printer programmed to reproduce a signature via a robotic arm holding a pen. It’s used widely in government and dates back to the days of Thomas Jefferson. Even Trump has repeatedly used it himself.
But the memo instructs the White House counsel, as well as the attorney general, to investigate “whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President.” It specifically orders them to investigate which documents—from executive orders to clemency grants—were signed with an autopen under Biden.
These investigations would, presumably, serve as precursors to trying to invalidate those policies and pardons. And that would be a precursor to lifting, among other things, the pardons Biden granted to his family and members of the House Select Committee that investigated the January 6th attack. At least, that’s how Trump sees it.
“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,” he wrote on Truth Social in March.
The problem is most legal scholars (that is, most scholars who don’t work for the Heritage Foundation where these ideas first started kicking around) say that not only is there no way to undo a pardon, but there’s no requirement that pardons even be signed. “The argument that the pardon fails because it was signed by an autopen fails at the get-go,” Jay Wexler, a professor of constitutional law at Boston University School of Law, recently told NPR.
In fact, during the George W. Bush administration, the Department of Justice also laid out a truly tediously detailed legal argument for why the autopen is an acceptable form of presidential signature.
In a statement to news outlets Wednesday, Biden said, “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”
To Trump the one true power is the power of the presidential pen. The only way he can see to invalidate what Biden did with that power is to claim it wasn’t actually him wielding it at all. Even if the legal argument fails, simply harassing his political enemies is half the battle.
