Biden Pardons Were Signed With Autopen While He Was On Vacation, Watchdog Finds

A government watchdog is sounding the alarm on former President Joe Biden’s liberal use of an autopen to sign official documents, saying it raises concerns about who controlled the presidency, given Biden’s cognitive decline.

Biden pardoned six criminals on December 30, 2022, with the “exact same autopen signature” while the president was vacationing and golfing in the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.

“Note they all say they are ‘Signed in the City of Washington,'” the Oversight Project posted on X.

Around the same time, an omnibus spending bill was flown to Biden in the Virgin Islands to sign, but the pardons all appear to be signed by autopen, the watchdog said.

“Whoever controlled the autopen controlled the presidency,” the Oversight Project said.

🚨 Autopen Update 🚨
We analyzed Biden's Jan. 19, 2025 "pardons" for:

-Biden Family Members
-Anthony Fauci
-General Milley
-J6 Committee
-Gerald Lundergan

They all have the same exact Biden autopen signature https://t.co/jc6mkx37il pic.twitter.com/8VeBDwLNv7

— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) March 11, 2025

Some prominent documents, including Hunter Biden’s pardon and Biden’s announcement that he was dropping out of the presidential race, appear to be hand signed, the watchdog found.

However, several other controversial pardons, including those for Dr. Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley, the January 6 committee, and other Biden family members, were all signed with the same autopen signature, Kyle Brosnan, chief counsel for the Oversight Project told The Daily Wire.

Brosnan said that using the autopen to sign presidential pardons is particularly “troubling” since the authority to issue them rests solely with the president as a “constitutional principle.”

“You have to look at it in the context of President Biden’s mental decline,” Brosnan said, noting that Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report last year called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

“I think we all saw with our own eyes his mental and physical deterioration over the course of his presidency,” Brosnan said. “There’s article after article that comes out showing how the Biden administration and his staff shielded him from public view, retinkered his schedule throughout the presidency, tried to script even what reporters he was calling on at press conferences, and that volume of evidence shows that President Biden wasn’t really running the White House. It was the staff. So if he’s not hand-signing these legally operative documents like pardons or even bills into law, that raises another question.”

The Justice Department should look into what the autopen policies of the previous White House were, whether certain individuals were authorized to operate the autopen, and what the approval process for affixing a signature looked like, Brosnan said.

“We need to figure out who was actually running the country for the last four years,” Brosnan said.

Brosnan said any legal cases against Biden’s signatures are still hypothetical, but he pointed to the questions around Chad Wolf’s status as acting homeland security secretary back in 2020, which resulted in a judge ruling that some of Wolf’s actions cracking down on illegal immigration were unlawful.