President Biden Had a Lot of Help from President Autopen

Joe Biden had an extraordinary level of help from his aides and the Autopen to grant clemency and pardons to thousands of Democrat voters in prison or who might go to prison.

In an interview with The New York Times, Joe Biden said that he had orally granted all the pardons and commutations just before he left office. Unsurprisingly, he called President Trump and other Republicans “liars” for claiming his aides had used an autopen to do it without his authorization.

“I made every decision,” Mr. Biden said in a phone interview on Thursday. The reason he gave was “we’re talking about a whole lot of people.”

Biden reduced the sentences of nearly 4,000 federal convicts and pre-emptively pardoned politically prominent people he considered potential targets of Mr. Trump for criminal investigations. Because they committed criminal acts?

According to the New York Times, Mr. Biden said in Thursday’s interview that he had his staff use an autopen for the warrants because he had granted clemency to so many people. The autopen was used, in all, on 25 pardon and commutation warrants from last December to January. Some of the individual warrants included large batches of names because they all fell into the same broad policy category, like reducing the sentences of nonviolent drug offenders who met standards Mr. Biden established.

Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people, he and aides confirmed. Rather, after extensive discussion of different possible criteria, he signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence.

The Bureau of Prisons kept updating information so the staff waited until they had all the information and ran them through.

The Autopen Presidents

At the Jan. 19 meeting, which took place in the Yellow Oval Room of the White House residence, Biden kept his aides until nearly 10 p.m. to talk through such decisions, according to Times’ sources.

The emails show that an aide to Mr. Siskel sent a draft summary of Mr. Biden’s decisions at that meeting to an assistant to Mr. Zients, copying Mr. Siskel, at 10:03 p.m. The assistant forwarded it to Mr. Reed and Mr. Zients, asking for their approval, and then sent a final version to Ms. Feldman — copying many meeting participants and aides — at 10:28 p.m.

Three minutes later, Mr. Zients hit “reply all” and wrote, “I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons.”

Biden’s mental acuity is the problem. Did he know what he was doing?  Did he do what he said? Does he remember anything given he often can’t remember when and where his son died? We’ll likely never really know. However, the investigation into his mental acuity continues.