Trump opens investigation into Biden autopen use

Then-President Joe Biden gives a pen to Bette Marafino, president of the Connecticut Chapter of the Alliance for Retired Americans, after he signed the Social Security Fairness Act during an event in the East Room of the White House on Jan. 5, 2025. (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump late Wednesday ordered the White House legal counsel and U.S. attorney general to investigate when Biden administration staff used an autopen to sign the former president’s name on official documents, alleging that Biden might not have known or approved of their actions.

The inquiry represents an escalation in Trump’s animosity toward and legal action against former President Joe Biden, who vehemently denies the allegations that he didn’t know what executive orders or pardons were signed during his term.

Trump has repeatedly suggested that Biden wasn’t fully cognizant during the end of his administration. Similar concerns were reported on by dozens of news organizations following Biden’s answers and behavior during a debate in June 2024.

Biden’s apparent confusion during some of the debate raised alarm bells among fellow Democrats and eventually led him to withdraw from his reelection campaign, later endorsing then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump’s memorandum alleges “Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority.

“This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history. The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.” 

The memo stated that if Biden staff used an autopen, a mechanical device that mimics a person’s signature, “to conceal this incapacity, while taking radical executive actions all in his name, that would constitute an unconstitutional wielding of the power of the Presidency, a circumstance that would have implications for the legality and validity of numerous executive actions undertaken in Biden’s name.”

Trump said Thursday during an appearance in the Oval Office that he hadn’t discovered any evidence that Biden aides violated the law.

“No, but I’ve uncovered the human mind,” Trump said. “I was in a debate with the human mind and I didn’t think he knew what the hell he was doing. So it’s one of those things, one of those problems. We can’t ever allow that to happen to our country.”  

Biden released a written statement rejecting the claims Trump laid out in the memo, arguing the investigation “is nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations.”

“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations,” Biden wrote. “Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”