Biden aides committed 'crimes' with autopen, Trump tells The Post's 'Pod Force One'
Aides to former President Joe Biden committed 'crimes' by using the White House autopen to sign official orders and pardons without his knowledge, President Trump claimed on The Post's 'Pod Force One' podcast, hosted by Miranda Devine.
'The people who ran this country were radical left lunatics… They didn't want [Biden]. They wanted Bernie Sanders,' Trump, 78, told Devine in the interview recorded Monday at the White House.
Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington. Subscribe here!
'I think for the first two weeks [after Biden took office], they were really, really disappointed. They couldn't even believe it,' the president added. 'And then they realized that you had somebody that didn't know what he was doing. They could do anything they wanted, because the autopen was the power.'
'That's a crime to do that to the country,' Trump went on. 'Well, number one, I really believe it was a crime because I don't think he knew he was doing it. I think that people took over the autopen. They got things signed that shouldn't have been signed.
5 Aides to former President Joe Biden committed 'crimes' by using the White House autopen to sign official orders and pardons, President Trump told The Post's 'Pod Force One' podcast.
AFP via Getty Images
'I don't believe he ever wanted open borders,' Trump explained. 'If you go back and look a few years before, he wanted borders as tight as I did. And so they took over the White House. These people took over. They're sick. And what they've done is terrible.'
Biden issued a flurry of executive actions upon taking office Jan. 20, 2021, including orders to terminate Trump's 'Remain in Mexico' program for asylum-seekers, reinstate the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and halt construction of a US-Mexico border wall.
The 46th president's unprecedented use of the pardon power coupled with his increasingly apparent cognitive decline has been likened to a scandal 'worse than Watergate,' with many of the pardons' uniform signatures having been seemingly authorized just with the autopen.
5 'They are criminals, and what they did to our country should never be forgotten,' Trump said. 'And hopefully, as criminals, they'll pay a price for what they do.'
Ron Sachs – CNP for NY Post
Biden White House sources previously spilled to The Post that at least one aide is suspected of having made determinations for auto-signatures that exceeded their authority.
The Justice Department launched an investigation into the autopen controversy last week, with pardon attorney Ed Martin instructing subordinates to look at whether Biden was 'competent' enough to sign the presidential orders.
In a June 4 memo to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump also placed blame on White House aides who 'abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden's cognitive decline and assert Article II authority.'
'I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn't is ridiculous and false,' Biden said in a defiant statement after the investigation was ordered.
5 The first family clemencies for any future prosecutions stretched from Jan. 1, 2014, to the date of the pardon being issued, either Dec. 1, 2024, for Hunter Biden, or Jan. 19, 2025, for the other relatives.
csuarez
Some of Biden's signatures — like the one on his sweeping Dec. 1, 2024, pardon for his son Hunter — have lighter ink and are slanted upward, suggesting they were done by hand.
Those signed on the day Biden left office that shielded other family members, such as brother James Biden, from future prosecution appear bolder and more uniform, suggesting they were done via autopen, a mechanical device that has been used at least since former President Harry Truman was in office.
The Biden family exemption from any future prosecution stretched from Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 1, 2024, for Hunter, and from Jan. 1, 2014, to Jan. 19, 2025, for the others.
Hunter's pardon also exonerated the troubled first son from a felony conviction for illegally purchasing a firearm while addicted to crack cocaine in October 2018 and a guilty plea for evading $1.4 million in taxes.
5 Some of Biden's signatures — like the one on his sweeping pardon for his son Hunter Biden — have lighter ink and are slanted upward, implying a personal touch.
Getty Images
Martin's probe will focus on pardons for the five first family members and their spouses — James and Sara Jones Biden, Frank Biden, John T. Owens and Valerie Biden Owens — as well as sentence commutations for 37 of the 40 men on federal death row, including child killers and mass murderers.
'You could just sign as much as you want,' Trump said on 'Pod Force One.'
'You see, it's exactly the same. There's zero change,' he added of the signatures. 'When you sign your name, everyone's a little bit different, right? When you have an auto pen, it's the exactly the same thing.'
An analysis conducted earlier this year by the Oversight Project, an offshoot of the conservative Heritage Foundation, declared that 'all' of Biden's signatures on official documents during his presidency appear to have used the autopen — except for his announcement that he was dropping out of the 2024 race.
5 'You could just sign as much as you want,' Trump noted on the first episode of 'Pod Force One.'
Ron Sachs – CNP for NY Post
Biden signed a total of 162 executive actions while in office, according to a tally compiled by the American Presidency Project at UC-Santa Barbara, and the most acts of clemency of any US commander-in-chief: 4,245 in total.
At least 1,500 were sentence commutations that occurred during the largest single-day clemency grant by any president in US history last Dec. 12.
House Republicans, led by Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), have started a similar inquiry into the allegations of a White House cover-up involving aides who hid the president's diminishing mental acuity from the public.
Trump's White House only allows two top aides — staff secretary Will Scharf and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles — to use the autopen 'for all matters,' according to an internal Jan. 28 memo previously reported by The Post.
'It was people that surrounded that desk that operated the autopen. They surrounded the beautiful Resolute Desk,' Trump said.
'They are criminals, and what they did to our country should never be forgotten. And hopefully, as criminals, they'll pay a price for what they do.'
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