Trump escalates long-running attack on Biden autopen use and claims he’s ‘cancelling’ actions signed with it

Combined photo of U.S. President Donald Trump and former president Joe Biden. (AP)

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday continued his effort to delegitimize actions taken during Joe Biden’s presidency, claiming in a social media post that he is “cancelling all executive orders, and anything else that was not directly signed” by his predecessor.

Trump’s declaration, made in a post on Truth Social, raises a number of questions. Chief among them, whether he has the legal authority to rescind the former U.S. president’s actions on the basis he described.

“Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect,” Trump wrote, without specifying what falls under that 92%.

“The Autopen is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the President of the United States,” he added.

Trump further claimed that Biden “was not involved in the Autopen process” and warned that “if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury.”

“The Radical Left Lunatics circling Biden around the beautiful Resolute Desk in the Oval Office took the Presidency away from him. I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally. Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and, if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump wrote in his post.

Biden has publicly disputed that there was any “cover-up” by his administration, saying he made all decisions as president and calling Republicans who have suggested otherwise “liars.”

Trump has long fixated on Biden’s use of the autopen. In March, he leaned into the idea that the former president’s use of the tool to sign documents showed that he wasn’t in charge while in the White House and that his actions were “null and void.”

At the time, conservative executive authority scholar John Yoo suggested to CNN that Trump was “just having fun at Biden’s expense.”

Trump later ordered an investigation into Biden’s use of the autopen and its supposed links to the former president’s “cognitive decline.”

In 2005, the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (under former U.S. president George W. Bush) conducted an extensive review of the legality of a president using the autopen. It found that “the President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill to sign it within the meaning of Article I, Section 7.”

Trump has most often focused his autopen theory on Biden’s pardons. But there too, established legal advice from past administrations undermines the claim. A 1929 memo from the U.S. solicitor general noted that the Constitution didn’t even prescribe a method for issuing pardons.

A separate U.S. congressional probe asserted it remained a serious question as to whether Biden was aware of the substance of various pardons and commutations signed in his name via autopen, but it did not cite any direct evidence that anyone other than Biden made the decisions that his staff later put into effect.