For President Donald Trump, there tends to be a fine line between the dangerous and the absurd. His latest broadside against his predecessor Joe Biden hopscotches between the two effortlessly. In a memo issued Wednesday, the president ordered the White House counsel and Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether Biden’s aides used “autopen” signatures to hide an alleged cognitive decline.
Trump’s obsession with the use of an autopen in Biden’s White House stretches back months.
Trump’s obsession with the use of an autopen in Biden’s White House stretches back months. He claimed in March that pardons Biden signed were supposedly void because of an autopen’s use. Last month, he foreshadowed to reporters that his administration would “start looking into this whole thing with who signed this legislation. Who signed legislation opening our border? I don’t think he knew.”
It’s a bonkers line of inquiry, not least because autopens aren’t exactly a new thing for a chief executive to use. Presidents going back to Harry Truman have had them around to sign their name to personal documents and correspondence. It became a talking point for Republicans in 2011, though, when President Barack Obama became the first to use the machine to affix his signature to a law while he was overseas. He used the autopen again while in Hawaii in 2013 to sign legislation to prevent a government shutdown.
Even then, though, it was a bit of a tempest in a teapot, legally speaking at least. Before Obama even became president, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had determined under President George W. Bush that it was constitutionally kosher to use an autopen to sign legislation. “We emphasize that we are not suggesting that the President may delegate the decision to approve and sign a bill,” wrote Deputy Attorney General Howard Nielson for the OLC, “only that, having made this decision, he may direct a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to the bill.” Not everyone has agreed with that assessment, but there were no legal challenges to its usage during the Obama era.
There’s a thread to pull at there that might lure in some of the more disillusioned on the left who are eager to see shadowy puppet masters pulling the party’s strings.
But now, this supposed secret autopen plot has gone from Truth Social posts to Justice Department investigations. Whatever probe Bondi conducts would theoretically hinge not on whether the White House autopen was used to sign official documents but on somehow proving that it was used without Biden’s express authorization. Is there any evidence backing up Trump’s allegation? Of course not, and Trump himself said as much in the Oval Office on Thursday.
But just because the investigation will likely go nowhere doesn’t mean that there isn’t ample reason for Republicans to lean into this fiction. The rush from Trump’s allies to capitalize on the conspiracy theory was telling, as my colleague Steve Benen noted Thursday: “With this in mind, the endgame is coming into focus: Trump and his party want to invalidate parts of Biden’s presidency, clearing the way for, among other things, new partisan investigations into those whom Biden protected, further empowering the incumbent in the process.”
I’ll add to that assessment that the focus on Biden’s supposed actions — rather than on Biden himself — is cynically clever. It darkly mirrors the internal debate Democrats are still having over whether Biden’s diminished capacity to run for re-election was at all purposefully hidden until it was too late. In going one step further, Trump’s investigation adds an evidence-free motive to explain why Americans would be kept out of the loop. There’s a thread to pull at there that might lure in some of the more disillusioned on the left who are eager to see shadowy puppet masters pulling the party’s strings.
Again, none of this will amount to anything legally without concrete evidence that a law or other official document was falsely signed without Biden’s consent. In both reality and the conspiracy theory being spun here, the autopen is merely a tool to be used. And in Trump’s hands, it’s gone from being a useful time-saver to a handy excuse to further politically persecute his predecessor’s allies.
