The UK Daily Mail ran a breaking story last week headlined, “Biden autopen signature appears on almost every document, report finds.” The presidential autopen has a long and storied history. President Eisenhower began using the mechanical device to sign letters and thank-you cards back in the 1950s. But in 2011, President Obama infamously used the presidential autopen to sign a Patriot Act extension while he was traveling in Europe— the first known use of the scribbling gadget to enact a law.
After skeptics complained, the DOJ issued an infamous opinion that presidential autopen signatures were legal, so long as the president had authorized it and knew what the document said. You can understand the logic in this digital age. Even a mouse click on an “I accept” button constitutes a legal signature these days, letting Jimmy Johns ding your bank account for the rest of your life for $7.95 a month, as its brand-new member of the hasty-sub-club.
And it’s all perfectly legal, even if you didn’t read all the three-point type in the End User License Agreement.
In the digital era, what even is a signature anymore? Well, Joe Biden fully embraced that philosophy and went wild with it. He autosigned everything— including, apparently, plastic spatulas (I am not making that up).
This week, news broke of Intrepid independent researchers at the Oversight Project, organized by the Heritage Foundation, who compared all Biden’s executive order signatures. Unsurprisingly, they found that nearly every single Biden executive order was not signed by the presidential cabbage but by the presidential auto-signing machine. Even the Fauci pardon. Even the pardon for his own family:
CLIP: Oversight Project— watch multiple Biden signatures collapse into identical form (0:15).
So far as I know, Biden set records by becoming the first president to robotically sign his own executive orders. Hey, that signing pen is heavy. And every time you get to the office, it’s sign this, sign that and then who has time for watching Nickelodean reruns and reading your niece’s diary?
On March 5th, Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey asked the DOJ to investigate all this robotic signing and confirm that Biden actually knew they were even doing it:
It raises an intriguing question: if Biden didn’t know what his rogue autopen was signing, then who did? And if it wasn’t Biden, are all those pardons legal? Remember— the key question over legality is informed consent. While Biden might be presumed to have authorized the autopen’s use, where is the evidence?
Surely, for a presidential act as significant as signing bills into law, executive orders, or pardons for large groups of crooked malefactors, there should be some evidence of prior approval.
The story does not seem likely to fade away soon. If anything, it is picking up autopen-like speed. Yesterday, the New York Post ran a story headlined, “Biden sources suspect key aide may have abused autopen as Trump’s ‘far more restrictive’ signing rules revealed.” According to the Post, “two former White House sources” accused one particular key Biden aide of exceeding their authority, by liberally using the mechanical scribbling robot to sign official documents on President Autopen’s behalf.
The Post responsibly (and probably to avoid a lawsuit) did not disclose the ‘key staffer’s’ name, absent any non-testimonial evidence, and in light of denials by former colleagues. But the source said other staffers wouldn’t necessarily know, since Biden’s White House culture was “shut up and don’t ask questions.”
The Post asked the alleged autopen aide, but they “did not respond to requests for comment.”
On Thursday, reacting to the news, President Trump signed a strict new order setting out restrictive guidelines for using the presidential autopen— all common-sense rules you could easily predict. The Trump autopen is never to be used for anything with official effect, such as EOs, bills, appointments, pardons, or nominations, and not even more routine things like memos or invitations to foreign leaders.
In all official settings, Trump will only sign official documents in front of at least two witnesses.
Yesterday, President Trump gave a major speech at the Department of Justice (to the Department of Justice). Among his wide-ranging and pointed remarks about two-tiered justice, Trump commented on the burgeoning Biden autopen scandal (0:17). He said, “You don’t use autopen. Number one, it’s disrespectful to the office. Number two, maybe it’s not even valid. Biden had no idea what the hell he was doing.”
It’s not fair to call Biden’s over-muscled autopenning ‘record-breaking.’ The debate itself is astonishingly surreal. It defies prediction. How is it possible that we are learning of Biden’s overuse of green screens and fake signatures— and the still unanswered question of whether he ever even knew what he was doing?
In defending all this artifice and automated governance, Democrats and the culpable media have scrubbed into oblivion the already-blurry line between official, legal reality and movie-magic stage management. At this point, the better questions might be: what, if anything, was real about Biden’s presidency? And if not Biden, who was the real president?
When you have a fake election that puts a fake “President” in office, you can use fake signatures.