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Justice Department plans to waste time with Biden investigation [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-06-03
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department plans to waste time investigating whether former President Joe Biden was mentally competent enough to issue pardons during his final weeks in office, based on lies around Biden’s use of a tool to automatically sign documents.
Trump’s handpicked DOJ pardon attorney, Ed Martin, is digging into Biden’s end-of-term clemency decisions, according to an internal email obtained by Reuters. The probe stems from Trumpworld’s latest conspiracy theory: that Biden was too cognitively impaired to make those calls on his own.
In his final weeks, Biden commuted death row sentences, shielded public servants, and preemptively protected family members from likely political retribution. And in December, he oversaw what was then the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history, commuting the sentences of roughly 1,500 people placed on home confinement during the pandemic, and pardoning 39 Americans convicted of nonviolent crimes.
Now, according to Reuters, Martin is looking into whether Biden was manipulated—or even unaware of what he was signing. The angle President Donald Trump’s team appears to be pursuing is whether the signatures on those pardons were made with an autopen, a tool that replicates a person’s signature. Notably, a 2005 DOJ memo found autopen use to be legally valid for presidential signatures.
Former President Joe Biden
Still, Trump and his allies are seizing on it.
“I understand he signed almost everything with an autopen,” Trump said in the Oval Office last week. “It’s a very dangerous thing. It really means you’re not president.”
There’s no evidence Biden didn’t authorize the pardons. His aides and allies have dismissed the idea that he was not capable of making critical decisions during that time. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from treating his health, including his newly disclosed cancer diagnosis, as fresh ammunition.
Martin’s email doesn’t say who ordered the investigation or which Biden family members are being scrutinized. But even before this, Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, had suggested Biden testify before Congress over his use of an autopen—never mind that the Constitution gives presidents broad, unilateral clemency powers.
The hypocrisy writes itself. Trump issued a record-breaking number of pardons and commutations, including for disgraced former members of Congress, family members of campaign donors, reality TV personalities, and all of the more than 1,500 supporters charged or convicted over their involvement in Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Martin, a fellow election denier, hasn’t raised a single concern about that.
Most recently, Trump commuted the sentence of a Miami health care executive convicted of Medicare fraud.
Publicly, Martin has called presidential pardon power “plenary,” or absolute.
“If you use the autopen for pardon power, I don't think that that's necessarily a problem,” he said at a May press conference, then clarified that he thought Biden’s pardons still deserved skepticism.
Biden, now 82, dropped his reelection bid last summer after a disastrous debate performance against Trump. But the GOP isn’t done with him—because going after Biden is the only move they’ve got.
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