The MAGA lawmaker overseeing the investigation into former President Joe Biden’s autopen use has vowed to probe the former president’s judicial appointments.
During an appearance on Fox News, Kentucky Rep. James Comer, who leads the House Oversight Committee, said his inquiry would “look at everything that was signed with the autopen,” including executive orders, pardons, and nominees.
“There were some even nominees in the Biden administration—their paperwork was signed with the autopen at a time when the President’s mental fitness is in question,” Comer said last week.
Asked if that included “looking into” Biden’s judicial appointments, Comer replied, “Absolutely. Everything that was signed with the autopen, especially in the last year of the Biden presidency.”
The former president appointed a record 187 district court judges and 45 appeals court judges, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Comer didn’t say which appointments he suspected were done via autopen—a machine that presidents dating back to former President Harry Truman have used to replicate their signatures—or provide any evidence that the autopen’s use was improper.
The Biden autopen saga began in March, when Trump became fixated on the idea that Biden had used an autopen to sign pre-emptive pardons for the members of Congress who investigated Trump’s role in the deadly January 6, 2021, supposedly making them invalid.
But Trump himself has used the autopen, which legal scholars agree is constitutional. The Department of Justice said in a 2005 memo that the pen was a legally valid way for the president to sign bills.
Trump and his allies have therefore resorted to arguing that Biden was too senile during his presidency to make his own decisions and that his aides were running the White House via autopen.
Biden has slammed those claims, calling Trump and his team “liars” and accusing them of trying to distract from other issues.
His former aides have refused to answer questions from Comer’s committee, choosing instead to assert their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.
“This raises an issue whether these pardons, whether these judicial appointments and whether these executive orders are legal,” Comer told Fox on Sunday.
“I believe if this investigation goes in the way that it is going, it will raise serious concerns about whether or not Joe Biden even knew what was going on around him, much less whether he authorized the use of his signature,” he continued. “I think all of these are in jeopardy of being declared null and void in a court of law.”
But experts agree that there is no legal mechanism for a court to overturn a presidential pardon.
The Supreme Court has held that the president’s power to grant pardons for federal crimes is basically “unlimited,” and neither Congress nor the courts have the power to review the pardons, according to SCOTUSblog.
Trump has already revoked dozens of Biden’s other executive orders, making an investigation into their legality moot.
As for the judicial appointments, it will be hard for Trump and his allies to argue that Biden didn’t know what he was doing, especially with Brown Jackson.
The two appeared together when Biden gave a speech announcing her nomination and watched together as the Senate voted to confirm her. Biden was also on hand for her investiture ceremony at the Supreme Court.
Comer nevertheless told Fox that Biden’s autopen use was “the biggest scandal in the history of American politics.”
That assessment came as Trump spent the weekend trying to convince his base to stop inquiring about the president’s 15-year friendship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking.
