Biden attempts to straighten the record on his autopen

President Joe Biden granted 1,500 pardons in what was the largest single-day act of clemency by a US president back in January, on his final full day in office. But these were not the typical pardons since Biden did not actually sit down, uncap a fat Sharpie and draw out his signature. No: the pardons were granted with the autopen, and the Department of Justice and congressional Republicans have been investigating whether the former president was actually aware they were being signed.

After seven months of crickets, Biden finally broke his silence on these accusations, last Thursday. He spoke to the New York Times, maintaining he “made every decision,” and he did it “because there were a lot of them.”

The January 19 pardons did two things. First, they tackled what Biden deemed unfair treatment of federal convicts charged and sentenced for drug-related crimes. He prevented about 1,500 people serving home confinement from being returned to jail, he reduced the sentences of about 2,500 nonviolent drug offenders – and he released all but three of the 40 inmates on death row to life without parole.

Squished between these drug-related pardons is the second (and more controversial) group of clemency recipients: members of Biden’s family and other allies. Specifically, his pardons covered his younger sister Valerie Biden Owens and her husband John; Biden’s younger brother James B. Biden and his wife Sara; and Biden’s other younger brother Francis W. Biden. These familial pardons follow Hunter Biden’s full and unconditional pardon from December last year for “any crime he did or may have committed since 2014.”

The New York Times reporter asked Biden why he pardoned his family even though, as Biden said, they “didn’t do anything wrong.”

This was the former president’s eloquent defense: “In terms of my fam – he – go after me through my family. I know how vindictive he is. I mean, everybody knows how vindictive he is. So we knew that they’d do what they’re doing now,” the former president said with a laugh. “My sister, my brother-in-law, my – my brother, etc. And – and all it would do is, if they, if he went after them, would be, is run up legal bills. I just, I just know how he operates. And so I made – but I consciously made all those decisions, among others.”

Run up legal bills it would have.

Biden also pardoned Dr. Anthony Fauci for “any offenses against the United States” he took from 2014 all the way up through the pandemic. The New York Times didn’t press Biden about his Fauci pardon, but Cockburn thinks the former president could have been saving the old NIAID director a few legal expenses as well. Cockburn remembers watching one congressional hearing from last June when Fauci explained that the CDC’s “six feet apart” social distancing guideline had no scientific experiments backing it.

During the interview, Biden also said, “The autopen is, you know, is legal.” He added, “As you know, other presidents used it, including Trump.”

And speaking of Trump, the former president had a word to say of his successor. “They’re liars. They know it. They know, for certain. I mean, this is – look, what they, they’ve had a pretty good thing going here. They’ve done so badly. They’ve lied so consistently about almost everything they’re doing. The best thing they can do is try to change the focus and focus on something else. And this is a – I think that’s what this is about.”

It seems as though Biden told the Times a slightly different story than what the Times published to its readers in its in-depth piece. In one instance, the Bureau of Prisons kept providing a stream of “additional information about specific inmates,” and the details of the pardons kept changing. So instead of bothering the president with signing and resigning these altered versions, his chief of staff Jeff Zients approved the use of Biden’s autopen.

When one person has access to the president’s button on justice, it must have been tempting to press it again…