Biden tried defending autopen use to the New York Times. He made it a whole lot worse.
The House Oversight Committee's investigation into former President Joe Biden's cognitive decline while in office, its cover-up, and its alleged exploitation behind the scenes appears to have struck a nerve, drawing Biden out and with him a baseline narrative that might trip up his handlers when they each testify in the weeks to come.
Mike Howell, the president of the Oversight Project — the government watchdog that revealed in early March that Biden's signature on numerous pardons, commutations, executive orders, and other documents of national consequence was machine-generated — told Blaze News, "We were right. Time for some real accountability."
'I made every single one of those.'
On Wednesday, former President Joe Biden's White House doctor, Kevin O'Connor, refused to answer the committee's questions, citing the Fifth Amendment and doctor-patient confidentiality.
The doctor's damning silence prompted Republicans on the committee to conclude that O'Connor "is trying to avoid criminal liability" and that the investigation was indeed dealing with a serious cover-up.
The next day, Biden spoke to the New York Times by phone in an apparent effort to get in front of the autopen scandal even though it left the station months ago. The roughly 10-minute interview didn't do him any favors.
Biden sent mixed signals to the Times about his supposed involvement in the issuance of a record number of pardons and commutations in the final days of his presidency.
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"I made every single one of those," Biden said regarding the clemency decisions late in his term. "And — including the categories, when we set this up to begin with. And so — but I understand why Trump would think that, because obviously, I guess, he doesn't focus much. Anyway, so — yes, I made every decision."
Despite attributing the clemency decisions to himself, Biden also indicated that his fingerprints might not be on any of them.
In addition to telling the Times that he orally communicated his decisions to aides — a possible tell that there might be a lack of papered evidence showing that he directly approved the last-minute pardons — Biden noted both that the autopen was used liberally because there were "a whole lot of people" and that he did not personally approve every individual categorical clemency.
"Well, first of all, there's categories. So, you know, they aren't reading names off for the commutations for those who had been home confinements for, during the pandemic," said Biden. "So the only things that really we read off names for were, for example, you know, was I, what was I going to do about, for example, Mark Milley?"
"I told them I wanted to make sure he had a pardon because I knew exactly what Trump would do — without any merit, I might add," continued Biden. "And you know, you know, members of the Jan. 6 committee — it's just, there were no — I was deeply involved. I laid out a strategy how I want to go about these, dealing with pardons and commutations. I was — and I pulled the team in to say this is how I want to get it done generically and then specifically. And so, you know, that's just — this is how it worked."
Biden White House emails turned over to investigators by the National Archives and reviewed by the Times cast further doubt on the former president's claim of deep involvement in the pardon process.
'The truth will come out about who was, in fact, running the country.'
The emails indicate that Biden White House staff secretary Stefanie Feldman managed the use of the autopen.
Feldman, the national policy director for Biden's 2020 campaign, took over for Neera Tanden, who told Congress last month that she wielded the power of the autopen until May 2023 but suggested that she was authorized to do so.
According to the emails, Feldman sought written accounts confirming Biden's oral clemency instructions in "key meetings" with staffers. The trouble is that these accounts appear to have been secondhand and in some cases written up several days after the meetings.
Aides to senior Biden advisers who were present for the meetings apparently drafted the accounts confirming Biden's oral instructions. The two advisers named were Biden chief of staff Jeffrey Zients and then-White House counsel Ed Siskel.
Senior Democrats told Politico last year that Siskel organized talks among Biden aides in the former president's absence on "whether to issue pre-emptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House."
Lists of meeting participants indicate that the aides who drafted the accounts of Biden's supposed clemency instructions were not themselves present when the instructions were given.
Rather, the emails reportedly imply that the aides simply wrote up whatever their bosses relayed to them, then circulated the drafts to Siskel, Zients, and other meeting participants before sending along the final versions to the master of the autopen.
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As for the high-profile clemency decisions that came just before Biden left office, the final decision appears to have come from Zients.
Emails suggest that on Jan. 18 and Jan. 19, Biden had two meetings, the first with Zients, Siskel, and Bruce Reed — Axios indicated that Reed was sometimes referred to in the Biden White House as one of "the pooh-bahs" — and the second with Siskel, Reed, Anthony Bernal, Steve Ricchetti, and Annie Tomasini, all of whom are on congressional investigators' radar.
Bernal served as senior adviser to former first lady Jill Biden and was characterized as one of the most influential people in the White House and a key member of Biden's so-called politburo in Jake Tapper's and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson's new book, "Original Sin."
Ricchetti, former counselor to Biden, was among the names Department of Justice pardon attorney Ed Martin mentioned when announcing his investigation into the questionable "autopen" pardons issued in the final days of the Biden White House.
Tomasini was Biden's deputy chief of staff, who congressional investigators suspect may have been "involved in running interference on behalf of the former President and perhaps performing duties exclusively reserved for the President of the United States."
Biden supposedly kept his staffers until 10 p.m. at the Jan. 19 meeting where the pre-emptive pardons for Biden's family members were discussed. Three minutes after the meeting, Siskel sent a draft summary of the former president's alleged decision to Zients' assistant, who then forwarded it to Reed and Zients for approval. A final version went to Feldman minutes later, chased by a message from Zients apparently stating, "I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons."
When asked about evidence that Biden did not authorize the clemency actions, Trump White House spokesman Harrison Fields told the Times Sunday that Biden "should not be trusted" and that "the truth will come out about who was, in fact, running the country."
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