Autopen Pals

Did Biden Really Sign All that Stuff?

If you were to write a will and then after you passed away, one of your diabolical relatives found a codicil or amendment to that will, they could challenge your testament. Now imagine that the codicil left all of the estate to you. It was signed by the deceased but, upon investigation, it turns out it was not signed by hand. It was signed by a mechanical devicecalled an autopen. Do you think the will would hold up in court?

Autopen is the brand name of a device that mechanically produces a realistic-looking signature using a pen on paper. Such devices have been around for over a century and there is a current popular brand often used by celebrities or others who have to autograph pictures or sign cards. In fact, if you collect autographs (not a bad hobby—a Beatles autograph could get you tens of thousands, a Marilyn Monroe signature ten times that, and an autographed Tom Brady rookie card went for $3.1M in 2021), you already suffer from the bane of autopens. An autopen autograph is not worth nearly as much as a human autograph, even though it can be tough to determine the real signature from the autopen counterfeit.

That’s how autograph collectors look at autopens: they are the machine that makes counterfeits. Counterfeits are fake.

But the problem right now in our political life is whether an Executive Order (EO) signed by autopen rather than the President’s own hand has the same validity as a manually signed EO. As a country, we’ve never really parsed this out.

• Is an autopen valid if it is used in the presence of the President?

• Is an autopen valid if it is used with the express permission of the President, even if he is not in the room?

• Is an autopen signature valid if it is used when the President is not there?

• Is an autopen signature valid if it is used without the President’s knowledge?

Joe Biden signed 162 Eos during his term. An EO is an official directive issued by the sitting President that interprets or implements existing laws. They are published in the Federal Register and carry the same weight as a law although they bypass Congress, who would make laws if they could ever be bothered to show up for work. An EO cannot override existing laws or go against the Constitution, but they can have powerful consequences. They are instantly active—once they are signed, they go into full force unless or until they are superseded by Congressional legislation or overturned by a court.

The Oversight Project of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, found that Biden’s EO documents—all 162 of them—had identical signatures, which would be consistent with an autopen but not the human hand. Over the course of four years, signatures vary, even if only slightly. They slant up or down, the loops are larger, the spacing varies. These EO signatures of Joe Biden differed markedly from the signature published on social media when Biden withdrew from the Presidential race in July 2024. If you want to play detective, you can look up the Biden EO documents on the Federal Register and view the eerily similar signatures for yourself.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, Barack Obama used an autopen but rarely. Same with Trump. The question here is when is an autopen acceptable and when is it not? For instance, what if Biden had no idea that an EO was being signed, does the autopen invalidate the EO?

A History of Mechanical Signatures

The autopen was around in the 1950s, and some reports say machines that could replicate a signature were around 50 years before that. Some say Obama was the first to use the autopen in the White House, but there is a photo of some kind of automatic signing contraption on the desk of Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ). Certainly, the first well-documented use of the autopen in the White House occurred in 2013 when Barack Obama intended to sign a bill into law. He said that he wanted to sign the bill, but he was not going to be in Washington, D.C. at the right time. Obama arranged to have the bill signed into law with an autopen. He had gotten some legal documents together earlier that said that he could authorize his signature with an autopen, and it would be valid. In other words, Barack Obama knew he was on untested legal ground, and he took steps to make sure his autopen signature was recognized. That means Obama knew this stuff was dicey.

And back in the Obama days, the use of the autopen was safe, legal, and rare.

Other political figures who allegedly used an autopen did it mainly for repetitive documents like consular commissions, routine correspondence, or greeting cards.

Biden used the autopen for all or nearly all of his EO documents and he never once authorized its use in any formal or public way. In fact, the public never knew the autopen was used until the Heritage Foundation spilled the beans. It’s not even clear if Joe Biden knew what was happening. While I cannot prove this, you could absolutely make the case that somebody else put Biden’s signature on an EO and thus made a law or regulation and Biden had no clue what had happened.

That’s not even a stretch.

So, what does it mean when the President is so incapacitated and checked out that rogue staffers without names or known identities could, in theory at least, push out one extreme EO after the next? Some of these EO documents closed pipelines (and threw lots of people out of work), allowed transgender people into the military (where taxpayers picked up their elective surgery costs, but transgender personnel were exempted from combat), and we rejoined the Paris Climate Accords. Biden signed an EO that mandated the COVID vax for federal employees and contractors. which cost a lot of people their jobs and may have gotten some people vaccine injured. These were not esoteric ethereal EO documents, they had a real and sometimes powerful, even irreversible, impact on people’s lives. And now we find out Biden did not actually touch pen to paper to put them into law.

These questions come to mind:

• If staff could use an autopen to exert Presidential influence, is the government even valid? Did we have unelected staff people acting as President? Now every administration is full of unelected people, but not every administration has unelected people signing an EO.

• This represents not only a threat to our democracy, as Democrats like to call it, but does it challenge our Constitution? Is it a Constitutional crisis if an unknown agent(s) has been running the country by 162 EO documents signed mechanically?

• Do we in America even have the right to know who was making the decisions? Or can we elect a sack of potatoes and then let random people around the sack of potatoes run the country?

• And what if one of those random people was unelected Hunter Biden, who is guilty of more crimes than Al Capone? Not only did no one elect him, but what if he pardoned himself? Is that what our forefathers intended when they wrote the Constitution?

At the heart—or perhaps brain of the issue—is that Biden’s cognitive abilities. Biden’s mental capacity has often and publicly been called into question. No Democrat can doubt this—they practically forcibly removed him from the presidential campaign in July 2024 because he performed so poorly in his debate with Trump. There are numerous examples showing Biden shaking hands with the air or getting lost on the tarmac debarking from Air Force 1. Biden routinely said crazy things—remember oil cancer? How he was building a railroad over the Indian Ocean? How he traveled 17,000 miles with Premier Xi to the Tibetan Plateau? How he visited Nelson Mandela in prison? How he marched in Selma? Remember when he announced he had cancer? And who can forget Corn Pop? The list goes on and on and on.

The Constitution maintains that the person in the office of President must have the mental capacity to perform the duties of President—that’s where the 25^th Amendment comes in that allows the President to be temporarily or permanently removed from office. (Some Presidents are temporarily removed from office when they undergo surgery and are under anesthesia.) I cannot invoke the 25th amendment, it must be done by the Cabinet. Except in Biden’s case, the Cabinet failed to meet, was never really doing much of anything, and certainly not going to spill the beans on the grift.

The problem is that cognitive capacity is not really defined in the Constitution, and it has to be applied on a case-by-case basis. Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke. Biden has some sort of other problem. Both of them had wives more than willing to step in and run the United States although neither of them knew what they were doing. In both cases, the Cabinet acted like nothing was wrong.

From a legal standpoint, I would suspect that an autopen signature does not have the same standing legally as a signature made by a cognizant human being. In the wrong hands, an autopen could become a tool for forgery or fraud. If a spy broke into the White House, could he fire up the autopen and declare war? Or surrender the country? Sounds crazy but this story is right up there with it.

So here are some legal questions specific to the Biden debacle:

• When an EO was signed with an autopen, were there any witnesses?

• Did Biden know that an autopen was being used to put his signature on EOs?

• Did Biden know the content of the EO documents the autopen was signing?

• Was the autopen ever used without his consent?

• Was the autopen used against his consent?

• Was the autopen used for EO documents of which he was totally unaware?

• Was there ever a valid reason (such as being out of town) that prohibited a real signature and made the use of the autopen necessary?

Pardon Me

Now let’s come to the issue of presidential pardons. Legally, there is a difference between pardons (which grants the recipient full forgiveness of the crime) and commutations (which reduces the recipient’s sentence but still acknowledges the crime). Biden issued 88 pardons which is not any kind of record (Franklin Roosevelt, Biden’s hero, issued 2,819 pardons!) But Biden granted commutations or clemency to 4,100 people and that is a record. (The next in line for the most commutations is Obama with 1,715 commutations.)

Biden allegedly issued all of these pardons and commutations, but he signed by autopen. Can anyone even confirm that Biden intended to pardon or commute sentences on all of these thousands of people? By law, a pardon or sentence commutation requires executive discretion. Biden was legally allowed to pardon the people he pardoned, and he is legally allowed to grant clemency to whomever he chooses … but the assumption is that he understood who they were, what they had done, and why a pardon or clemency was appropriate. Did he know what was happening?

What if Biden did not have even know about the pardons? Would they be legal?

What is presidential power anyway? Is it just putting some person into the office and then automating their signature while hiding the old guy at his private home in Delaware? Or can the American people expect their president to understand the content of his actions? Can anyone with an autopen in the White House just go on a pardoning spree as long as there is a President somewhere?

This has never happened before.

The Ricochet Cafe Solution

The best solution to this problem is that all EO documents, treaties, or serious documents (not necessarily greeting cards) signed by the President be both witnessed and videotaped. If an autopen is to be used, that is fine, but it must be in the presence of the President and taped. A few witnesses would be nice, too.

If a President must sign something and he cannot be in Washington, well, I don’t see this as being a big headache. Business people sign all sorts of documents on the road. This is done every day. Why can’t a President? And if that is absolutely impossible and nothing can wait, then the President should take convincing steps to assure Americans that his autopen signature is made with his full knowledge and consent.

What to Do Now?

Can we challenge the pardons, the commutations, and literally every EO issued by Biden and signed in autopen? That’s most of them. Maybe even all of them.

Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating the document case of Joe Biden, concluded that Biden was both guilty of mishandling classified documents but so mentally impaired that it did not make sense to charge him. Hur assessed Biden as that befuddled. Hur said no one would convict him because he was just an old man who didn’t know what he was doing. Just based on Hur’s professional legal assessment of Biden’s mental state, no autopen should have ever been used in any circumstance. Biden simply had no clue what was going on.

Stories are leaking out even in the Democrat enclaves that Biden was completely lost during his term of office. He had zero knowledge of what was going on and a greedy son and a weird wife who kept wanting him to play President rather than get the help and rest he needed. I am no fan of Joe Biden, but what Jill and Hunter did to the old man was cruel. Savage, really.

If somebody used the autopen to put Biden’s name on documents that he knew nothing about, it seems to me that it would be a type of forgery and a serious crime. It might even invalidate every single EO and document signed by someone-who-was-not-Joe-Biden.

Hey, Democrats, see you in court!