What is an autopen, and why is Trump obsessed with it?

Donald Trump, on Sunday, declared via social media that some of Joe Biden’s presidential pardons, including those for members of the Jan. 6 Committee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and members of Biden’s family beyond his son Hunter, were void because they were signed by an autopen device. Trump’s statement has made people curious about the technology and his own use of it.

Autopens are nothing new in the White House. The first president to use the technology was reportedly Harry Truman and Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were also open users. Despite this, Trump posted on Truth Social and spoke to the media on Air Force One Sunday, stirring up controversy.

“The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”

The accusation about the legitimacy of the autopen seemingly came from the Oversight Project, a self-described investigative arm of the Heritage Foundation, which was the organization behind Project 2025. Last week, the group questioned the legitimacy of the pardons and Biden’s executive orders, citing autopen usage.

The autopen has long been an open secret in Washington, but Trump’s focus on it and the possibility that he will try to challenge the legitimacy of pardons by his predecessor have raised some questions.

What is an autopen?

An autopen is a robotic device used to duplicate signatures, using an actual pen rather than a scanned version of someone’s signature. It’s a slightly different process than an electronic signature, which is just a digital photo of a real signature. Documents signed with autopens use a robotic arm with a pen attached, mimicking the penstrokes of the signee.

While Truman was the first to use it, it’s a tool that has been commonly used by presidents since at least the Kennedy administration. Lyndon Johnson allowed the device to be photographed in the White House, which resulted in a National Enquirer story titled, “The Robot That Sits in for the President.”

More recently, it was the subject of controversy when President Barack Obama authorized an aide to use it in 2011 on his behalf to extend the Patriot Act.

Are autopen signatures legal?

In 2005, the Justice Department was asked to weigh in on the legality of the autopen. In a memorandum, legal officials gave it their blessing, writing, “The President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law. Rather, the President may sign a bill within the meaning of Article 1, Section 7 by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.”

Has Trump used an autopen?

The New York Post quotes Trump Staff Secretary William Scharf as saying Trump does not use the autopen on documents that exercise the power of the presidency. However, he noted, it has been used on a single document that requires multiple presidential signatures.

It’s unclear how frequently Trump used it during his first term.

Can Trump void Biden’s pardons?

Trump, it’s worth pointing out, has not provided any evidence that Biden actually used an autopen. Newsweek even claims there is photographic proof of Biden signing many of the documents The Heritage Foundation claims were done via autopen.

Regardless of how the pardons were signed, there is no power in the Constitution or existing case law that gives a president any right to undo a pardon. Trump could (and may well) take the issue to court, something he implied would happen in his Air Force One conversation with media members, but there’s no precedent for such an action to be approved by the courts.

Should the courts step in, it would more likely be due to the fact that the pardons Trump is challenging were pre-emptive pardons, which are different than traditional extension of clemency. 

Biden was hardly the first to issue a preemptive pardon, however. Abraham Lincoln issued them during the Civil War. Jimmy Carter gave a blanket pardon to anyone who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War. And Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor Richard Nixon in 1974 before any charges could be brought against the disgraced president.

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