(AFP) – The legal basis for his argument appears uncertain, but Donald Trump has sought to drum up outrage over his predecessor Joe Biden’s supposed use of autopen to sign presidential pardons and other documents. Trump’s attack on auto-signatures ignores that they have been used by previous presidents — and that there is no evidence Biden even used the technology for signing pardons, which gave immunity to a string of Trump political opponents.
However, the narrative taps into Trump’s longtime theory that a senile Biden was not in charge as president, while a mysterious “deep state” pulled the strings. The eye-catching autopen issue also serves to soak up attention as Trump is accused of a brazen push to expand his own powers. The Justice Department is clear on the legal situation. In 2005, it said the president does not need to sign a bill by hand and can direct an official “to affix the president’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.” Such rulings do little to curb Trump, or the Heritage Foundation — the right-wing think-tank that has pushed the autopen as an attack line.
“The whole subject of autopen, did (Biden) know what he was doing?” Trump asked reporters. “Did he authorize it? Or is there somebody in an office, maybe a radical left lunatic, just signing whatever that person wants? To sign pardons and all of the things that he signed with an autopen is disgraceful.” Trump’s claims of Biden using an autopen are unproven. Some US media have reported the Heritage Foundation’s evidence of auto-signing is based on digitized copies, not on original documents — which Biden was in some cases photographed signing personally.
The autopen process is common across US government and business for routine letters, photographs and promotional material, and has been used for presidential pardons in the past. “Trump cannot void a prior president’s pardons,” Frank Bowman, of the University of Missouri’s School of Law, who has written about the presidential pardon, told AFP. “A president does not have to personally sign a pardon to make it valid,” he added.
In 2011, The New York Times reported that Barack Obama had become the first president to sign a bill by autopen while in Europe. Paper versions are still sometimes flown to the president for signing. In his last days in office, Biden, now 82, issued pardons for people targeted by Trump — including Biden’s own son, lawmakers who probed Trump, a military general who had criticized Trump, and the country’s top Covid expert.
“I am not afraid of Trump’s latest midnight rant that has no basis in reality,” Bennie Thompson, one lawmaker pardoned by Biden, said in a statement to Axios news.
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