U.S. President Donald Trump has directed his administration to investigate his predecessor Joe Biden’s actions as president, including whether any orders or pardons he signed with an autopen are valid amid recent reporting that has raised questions around Biden’s “cognitive decline.”
The move is the boldest yet in Trump’s campaign against his political rivals and the quest by Republicans to overturn Biden’s legacy, which has been marred by growing questions about his ability to run the country that Trump is further amplifying.
Trump on Thursday called Biden’s alleged use of an autopen without his knowledge “the biggest scandal” in American political history, without providing any evidence.
“It’s a very bad thing, very dangerous,” Trump said in the Oval Office, arguing that, “essentially, whoever used the autopen was the president.”
Political experts say Trump’s investigation, which was ordered in a memorandum signed Wednesday, is baseless and breaks with decades of legal precedent.
“There’s no evidence that any of the moves that (Biden) made as president, in legislation or negotiations with other countries or military actions or anything, were affected by cognitive decline,” said Matthew Lebo, a political science professor at Western University.
Biden responded in a statement Wednesday night after Trump’s directive was issued: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”
An autopen, a tool that automatically generates signatures, has been used by U.S. presidents dating back to Thomas Jefferson in the 1800s. Trump has used it himself, but said Thursday that he limits its use to personal correspondence.
The Justice Department under Democratic and Republican administrations has recognized the use of an autopen to sign legislation and issue pardons for decades, and the president’s absolute pardon power is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
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In 2005, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush’s presidency found that “the president need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill to sign it within the meaning of” the constitution after conducting a review of the autopen’s legality.
Trump’s memorandum suggests Biden’s aides “abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert” presidential authority.
It adds that there are “serious doubts as to the decision making process and even the degree of Biden’s awareness” of the executive orders, memorandums, judicial appointments, and pardons and commutations signed during Biden’s presidency.
Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice, told Global News in an email that “the issue is authority, not the physical act of signing or an ink signature.”
“As long as President Biden authorized the use of the autopen, documents signed with an autopen are legally valid,” he said.
“Trump or others who are challenging the pardons will have to establish that Biden did not authorize the autopen signatures or the pardons themselves. This would be difficult to do without Biden himself saying the pardons were unauthorized.”
Biden pardoned several of Trump and Republicans’ top political targets, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, in the final days of his presidency.
Trump has presented no evidence that Biden was unaware of the actions taken in his name. He said Thursday that he witnessed Biden’s decline first-hand at their sole debate of the 2024 election last June.
“I was in a debate with the human mind, and I didn’t think he knew what the hell he was doing,” he said.
Biden’s ‘cognitive decline’
That disastrous debate performance pushed questions about Biden’s age and mental acuity to the forefront, ultimately leading him to withdraw from the presidential race three weeks later. He was replaced on the ticket by his vice-president, Kamala Harris, who lost the election to Trump.
The debate came months after U.S. special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, concluded in a final report that a jury wouldn’t convict Biden because they would see him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Trump’s memorandum cites that report, and further directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate any actions by Biden’s aides and White House staff to “cover up his inability to discharge his duties” and shield him from the public.
Republicans are also asking Biden’s top aides to testify about the final days of the last administration and “who was calling the shots,” the head of the U.S. Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, said in a statement Wednesday. Comer on Thursday subpoenaed Biden’s White House physicians to testify.
Since the election, a growing number of Democrats have come forward to acknowledge Biden had declined in the final years of his presidency, and that his closest aides hid that fact from lawmakers, donors, party leadership and voters.
In a recently released book titled Original Sin, authors Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios wrote, “Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”
Biden’s White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who fiercely defended him against questions about his fitness for office, is set to release a new book in October that her publisher says will examine what led up to Biden dropping out of the race.
Lebo said questions about Biden’s decision-making still pale in comparison with Trump’s actions in the White House.
“Biden had gaffes, but Donald Trump’s gaffes become policy,” he said.
“It’s part of the authoritarian playbook to challenge everything done by the opposition as illegitimate.”
— with files from Global’s Reggie Cecchini and The Associated Press
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