A scathing new House Oversight Committee report urges the Justice Department to investigate former President Biden’s use of the autopen for executive actions—especially presidential pardons—and accuses his aides of orchestrating a cover-up of his cognitive decline.
Entitled ‘The Biden Autopen Presidency; Decline, Delusion and Deception in the White House,’ the report is a culmination of a five-month probe into allegations that Biden’s aides attempted to hide his increasing cognitive impairment, and improperly used the autopen to issue executive orders without his direct consent.
“The Committee has found evidence they did both,” the document stated. “The Biden Autopen Presidency ranks among the greatest scandals in U.S. history.”
The largely Republican committee wrote in the 93-page report that no evidence was found that Biden gave consent to executive actions in several cases, including ones involving presidential pardons.
The Committee also alleged that Biden’s autopen, a device that replicates signatures and is often used by presidents to sign documents, may have been exploited by White House aides to approve executive orders without Biden’s knowledge.
In a shocking email uncovered by the New York Times, and quoted by National Review, Biden chief of staff Jeff Zients told White House officials just prior to Trump’s second inauguration, “I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons.”
That email offers clear evidence of White House staff taking unprecedented license to compensate for the president’s diminished abilities. This was a highly controversial move that experts say violated laws governing “pardoning power” that belongs exclusively to the president.
While the report offers little overt evidence that aides implemented policies without Biden’s knowledge, the smoking gun, emphasized Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley in an interview with The Heartlander, lies in what is missing from the presidential record that should be there.
“Each use of the presidential autopen is supposed to be memorialized in written directives. There is supposed to be a clear record created every time the president personally directs the use of the autopen,” Hawley pointed out.
The Committee’s report argued that any executive action lacking proof of the president’s authorization should be deemed “void,” and that numerous unrecorded clemency orders issued under Biden are therefore “illegitimate.”
Along with the report, the Committee sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, asking the DOJ to investigate every executive action taken during the Biden presidency to ensure the former president personally approved them, and to determine whether legal action should be taken.
White House Denied Evidence That Was Broadcast Live
Throughout President Biden’s term, the report noted, the public grew increasingly concerned that his frequent slurred speech, name mix-ups, visible disorientation, and reliance on aides for simple direction—all broadcast live—could not be explained by anything other than serious cognitive decline.
A June 2024 CBS News survey found that “72% of voters—as well as nearly half of his own party—believed Biden lacked the mental or cognitive health to serve as president.
The House Oversight document notes that more troubling than the president’s cognitive decline was the concerted effort by his loyal inner circle to deceive the nation into questioning their own senses. The president’s aides were virtually asking people to deny glaring evidence before their own eyes.
“President Biden’s cognitive decline was apparent to any person who watched him interact with the press, the public, or world leaders as president. Assertions to the contrary are nothing less than gaslighting,” Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer stated in a Fox News interview.
Even as evidence of the president’s ailing condition became impossible to ignore, his closest aides—including his own doctor—insisted with a straight face before the House committee that they had never noticed, much less discussed, any decline in Biden’s condition.
The report exposes the extraordinary lengths to which the former president’s inner circle went to conceal his declining mental and physical condition ahead of Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate, when he rambled incoherently and finally strung together a bizarre three-word sentence, “We beat Medicare!”
Comments and questions about his communication fiascos and air of disorientation were met with indignant denials by Biden administration officials.
Communications director Kate Bedingfield described questions about Biden’s mental acuity as “a disgusting smear tactic,” and a “false misleading conspiracy theory.”
When asked directly on a podcast if President Biden had dementia, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre replied, “I can’t even believe you are asking me this question. That is an incredibly offensive question,” and hung up, abruptly ending the interview.
The report also targets Biden’s doctor, Kevin O’Connor, accusing him of helping to cover up the president’s cognitive decline. The committee challenges O’Connor’s statement in February 2024 that Biden was “a healthy, active, robust 81-year-old male, who remains fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”
“The Committee requests that you investigate the actions of several key individuals from whom the Committee sought testimony,” the letter to Bondi reads. “Specifically, during the Committee’s investigation, two of President Biden’s most senior advisors, Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini, as well as White House Physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor appear to have been deeply involved in the cover-up” of Biden’s mental decline.”
The letter asks the DOJ to determine whether their alleged actions “constitute criminal activity.”
O’Connor, Bernal and Tomasini all refused to answer questions from the committee in July, invoking their 5th Amendment rights to shield themselves from potential criminal liability.
How They ‘Stage-Managed’ Him
Based on more than a dozen interviews with Biden aides, the Oversight Committee document details how, as the president began losing the ability to independently function in office, White House officials worked ever harder to prop him up.
They took steps to “meticulously stage-manage” Biden’s public appearances. They coordinated everything from his makeup, clothing and daily schedule, to the number of steps he could walk or climb without stumbling.
They limited the number of events he participated in; arranging frequent days off from all work, making it difficult even for senior Democrats to access the president, and keeping cabinet meetings to a minimum.
Teleprompters were used even at small, intimate events to avoid situations where Biden could embarrass himself and his supporters with irrelevant, childish or bizarre comments.
Most concerning, the investigation revealed holes in the chain of custody of the president’s decision binder, which contained decision memos to be signed or initialed by President Biden when approving executive actions.
Everything from the military vaccine mandate to the pardons of his family members was governed by a loose, informal and unofficial process, in which the president himself may or may not have played a role.
Likewise, the Committee found numerous instances in which the president’s approval for an executive action or the chief of staff’s approval of signature by autopen was not memorialized; no written record existed to verify the directive even came from the president.
“One fact that is consistent from our investigation is that no one who authorized the autopen ever got a direct order from Joe Biden,” asserted Committee Chairman James Comer. “Furthermore, there are no notes, there’s no chain of custody that would show that Joe Biden was present or involved in any way at meetings where they discussed the pardon process.”
As mentioned above, internal White House emails reveal Biden chief of staff Jeff Zients informing White House staff that he “approve[s] the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons. JZ.”
(During his meeting with the Oversight Committee, Zients claimed to have no recollection of his signing the telltale email. In addition, of all the Biden aides interviewed by the Oversight Committee, not one admitted knowing who it was that manually clicked the autopen.)
Two Pardons Granted Clemency to Thousands
The most damning revelation in the report pertains to the Biden Administration’s claims to have set a record by issuing the largest-ever “blanket pardon” for “nonviolent offenders.” This refers to the flood of clemency actions taken in the final days of the Biden presidency, a vast majority of which lacked a decision memo.
“Biden’s team used an autopen on 25 warrants for pardons and commutations but two of those warrants granted clemency to thousands of people [in one stroke], the NY Post clarified.
About 95 percent of all the pardons were issued in December and the weeks leading up to Biden’s last days in office, the article noted. On Dec. 12, he commuted roughly 1500 sentences and outright pardoned 39 more. Three days before he left office, the president commuted the sentences of nearly 2,500 federal inmates.
Just 15 minutes before his presidency ended, Biden issued the last set of pardons to members of his family, most notably his son, Hunter, his brothers, sister, and in-laws, as well as to controversial members of his administration such as Dr. Anthony Fauci and General Mark Milley.
Critics note the irony of Biden pardoning numerous individuals who were not accused of a crime and faced no investigation—an apparent bid to shield himself and his allies from the same kind of politically driven “lawfare” and prosecution his own administration had pursued against his opponents.
‘Non-Violent Offenders’?
The autopen was used to execute the massive number of clemency grants, all of which staffers insisted were “nonviolent.”
Yet documents reviewed by the Oversight Committee show that officials in the Justice Department were furious over the White House’s seemingly indiscriminate use of the presidential pardon, and challenged the claim that all those pardoned were non-violent offenders.
Bradley Weinsheimer, a senior ethics attorney with the Justice Department, harshly criticized White House officials for boasting that the Biden administration has pardoned more “non-violent” drug offenders than any other president.
“I think you should stop saying that because it is simply untrue,” Weinsheimer admonished administration officials in a January 17, 2025, memo. He countered that “in the pardons issued by the White House, we identified violent offenders, including those who committed acts of violence or who have a history of violence.”
Indeed, a closer look at the recipients of the pardons reveals that among them were hardcore, violent criminals “including murderers, child killers and abusers,” wrote a Newsweek op-ed.
Notoriously, one of the clemency decisions commuted the sentence of Adrian Peeler, a 48-year-old convicted of conspiring to murder an eight-year-old boy and his mother in 1999, reported National Review. Peeler wasn’t set to be released until 2033.
“At the time, Senator Blumenthal, a Democrat, clearly scandalized by Peeler’s release, speculated that somebody had ‘dropped the ball,’ the article said.
Weinsheimer fumed that the DOJ was kept out of the loop of the pardon activity and voiced his concern that the president was not aware of the backgrounds of all the cases he pardoned.
“Despite repeated requests and warnings,” Justice Department officials were “not afforded a reasonable opportunity to vet and provide input on those you were considering,” he wrote.
Weinsheimer, possibly glimpsing a future scenario where some of the released convicts would return to violent crime, was quick to establish for the record that the DOJ opposed the mass pardon and clemency process, and was “largely excluded from it.”
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Sen. Hawley: ‘Subpoena the Autopen Records’
“Americans can’t trust media with news or Democrats with power after their joint cover-up of Biden’s dementia,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley argued at a Senate Judiciary Hearing on the autopen scandal.
“Their own Justice Department interviewed Joe Biden and concluded he could not form the requisite mental state to stand trial,” Hawley said.
“Biden,” Hawley reminded the hearing, “let’s not forget, illegally took classified documents [before he was president] and kept them in his garage, in his freezer—he didn’t even know where he kept them.”
Special Counsel Robert Hur, who investigated this offense, concluded in February 2024 that Biden couldn’t be prosecuted as Trump had been, because, “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury…as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“And what did our Democrat colleagues say?” Hawley asked, noting that not a single Democrat showed up for the Senate Committee hearing.
The senator listed various Democrat denials of Biden’s cognitive decline, including from senators, congressmen and even Vice President Kamala Harris, all of whom claimed at the time that Hur’s report was “unfair” and “unfounded.”
“I found the president to be sharp, focused, impressive, formidable and effective,” Hawley quoted Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia.
Biden was “incredibly strong, forceful, and decisive,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-New York, had asserted.
“Where are they now?” demanded Hawley, gesturing to Democrats’ empty seats at the hearing. “They all changed their tunes after Joe Biden debated President Trump and the whole world could see he couldn’t even form a sentence.”
“They know they lied. That’s why they’re not here,” Hawley continued. “Because they’ve spent the last four years being part of this fraud. And now they’re still carrying on the fraud and the stonewall. They knew the guy wasn’t really in charge. They didn’t care. Because it was power for them.”
Hawley said he called on former President Biden to release his personal records. “There should be records of every time the president authorized the autopen. So, let’s subpoena the records and find out. Did he personally authorize its use or not? If there aren’t records, that’ll tell you the story. They evaded the law, broke the law.”
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Bombshell Admission
Biden granted 4,245 pardons and clemencies in his four years in office, an unprecedented record that dwarfs the 245 issued by Trump in his first term.
“I made every single one of those,” Biden told the New York Times in a phone interview regarding the pardons. Strangely, after insisting he “made every decision” he blurted out a bombshell admission that since there were so many names (“We’re talking about a lot of people!”), he did not individually approve each pardon, and had his staff replicate his signature.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, toward the bottom of the sprawling article, the Times buried an additional startling detail: The former president explained the pardon system was based on “broad categories” of eligibility, and he relied on staff to fill in the blanks with names that seemed to fit these categories with his autopen signature.
This stunning admission is consistent with allegations that pardons flowed out of the White House via the autopen for people about whom former President Biden had little or no knowledge. It also confirms emails reviewed by the Oversight Committee that indicate it was Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients who approved the use of the White House autopen.
Insiders testified that Zients was not acting alone, that in the last half year of Biden’s presidency, Hunter Biden was driving the decision-making for the family. “He was like the chief of staff,” one former staffer shared with Fox News.
“He was present at almost all high-level meetings and toward the end, I believe he was actually living in the White House,” Zients told the Oversight Committee.
“Did Hunter orchestrate the mass pardons in place of his father from behind the scenes?” Committee Chairman Comer wondered in an interview.
Even when Biden granted his son Hunter a sweeping pardon covering tax and gun felonies—as well as any potential crimes committed over an 11-year span—his aides doubted he could articulate a credible legal rationale for the decision, especially in view of his earlier pledge never to issue such a pardon.
According to Axios journalist Alex Thompson, the president was handed a notecard of pre-approved talking points and permitted to address the press only under tightly controlled conditions. If indeed Hunter was running things, he wasn’t taking any chances.
