President Donald Trump said a batch of preemptive pardons issued by Joe Biden in the closing hours of his presidency are “void, vacant, and of no further force or effect.”
Biden handed out the last-minute blanket pardons to a variety of figures he considered targets for Trump’s political retribution. They included Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; retired Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and lawmakers and staffers from the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
To reporters late Sunday evening and later on social media, Trump claimed the pardons are null because Biden had used an autopen rather than sign by hand.
What’s an autopen?
“In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!” the president said in a Truth Social post just after midnight.
Trump was echoing suggestions by the conservative Heritage Foundation that his predecessor used an autopen − a machine used to automatically add a signature to documents − in signing the pardons. Heritage said it found apparently identical signatures on several Biden documents.
The Justice Department has said a president “need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law.”
“Rather,” the Justice Department said in 2005, “the President may sign a bill within the meaning of Article I, Section 7 by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.”
Biden’s use of pardons to shield a slew of people who had not yet been accused of a crime was a decision met with criticism from opponents as well as from fellow Democrats.
Asked whether the pardons will hold, Trump said in a gaggle aboard Air Force One: “It’s not my decision; that’ll be up to a court. But I would say that they’re null and void.”