President Donald Trump falsely claimed the social media site Truth Social that pardons by former President Joe Biden are “void” because they were supposedly signed by auto pen and Biden didn’t know anything about them, reports MSNBC and Newsweek:
Trump is using analysis from The Heritage Foundation to accuse Joe Biden of not physically signing several documents, including key pardons.
The Oversight Project, a branch of The Heritage Foundation — the think tank that wrote Project 2025 — is claiming that the Biden White House used an automated signature to place Biden’s name on several key documents that happen to counter Trump’s agenda.
According to the New York Post, this is corroborated by an anonymous Biden staffer who it claims took unilateral decisions on what the president was signing by affixing an auto-signature. However, per the newspaper’sreporting: “The Post is not publishing that staffer’s name due to the lack of concrete evidence and refutations by other colleagues.”
The signatures picked by The Heritage Foundation are from the National Archives. The National Archives do not display original copies of documents, but digitized versions.
These copies use a computer-generated signature for where the President signed the document, meaning that online copies of Biden’s signature appear to be auto-signed, but they’re not the original version. There is photographic proof of Biden signing many of the documents that The Heritage Foundation is claiming were signed by autopen.
This is the same for documents from the Trump administration that are on the National Archives site.
Donald Trump is using the allegations of an autopen signature to attempt to void the pardons offered by Biden to political opponents of Trump and MAGA.
Even if Biden did use an autopen, the Justice Department (DOJ) in 2005 stated: “The President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law,” so Trump’s argument is not legally valid.
(Sources: Newsweek, Newsweek, MSNBC/YouTube)