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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/16/joe-biden-autopen-pardons-commutations/

Joe Biden’s autopen pardon party
He pardoned or commuted the sentences of some awful people. Was he even aware?
Opinion
Jim Geraghty
July 16, 2025 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

It is not reassuring to see that former president Joe Biden and his former aides told the New York Times that, as the paper put it, he “did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people” at the end of his term. Instead, according to the Times report, published roughly half a year after the pardons became official, Biden “signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence.”

Now, call me crazy, but if the president of the United States is going to pardon somebody or commute a felon’s sentence, I think they ought to be familiar with the facts of the case. They shouldn’t be running through the federal criminal justice system, popping out commutations like a Pez dispenser.

Right before he left office, Biden pardoned or commuted the sentences for a whole bunch of reprehensible creeps.

Take the “kids-for-cash” judge, convicted of taking $2.1 million in bribes to send juvenile offenders to for-profit detention centers with sentences disproportionate to their crimes. Some of the children were as young as 10 — and were first-time offenders. One of the them killed himself. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) called Biden’s commutation of the former judge’s sentence “absolutely wrong.”

Or the disgraced Ohio county commissioner who took $450,000 in bribes, including Las Vegas trips, prostitutes and an outdoor pizza oven. Or the appalling Dixon, Illinois, city comptroller convicted of embezzling $53.7 million from the city — pegged as the largest municipal theft in U.S. history. Or the fund manager who bilked investors out of more than $665 million in the biggest financial fraud case ever tried in Chicago.

At the time, Biden boasted, “America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances. As president, I have the great privilege of extending mercy to people who have demonstrated remorse and rehabilitation, restoring opportunity for Americans to participate in daily life and contribute to their communities.”

What did these folks do to warrant such a generous second chance? Has Joe Biden ever done anything so nice for you? You deserve a break a heck of a lot more than they did; you haven’t scammed little old ladies or embezzled millions from a municipal budget. (Well, you probably haven’t done those things.)

It got lost in the controversy surrounding the pardon of Hunter Biden — you know, the one that Biden repeatedly assured the American public that he would never give — but it is more than fair to wonder just how closely Biden or anyone around him reviewed the details of these cases.

Headlines at the time kept emphasizing how Biden was pardoning nonviolent offenders.

Eh. In the case of Josephine Virginia Gray, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2002 for insurance fraud schemes connected to the murders of three men between 1974 and 1996, that is only technically true. She was resentenced in 2006.

Did anybody in the Biden team read through the file?

The Times further reported, “the Bureau of Prisons kept providing additional information about specific inmates, resulting in small changes to the list. Rather than ask Mr. Biden to keep signing revised versions, his staff waited and then ran the final version through the autopen, which they saw as a routine procedure.”

Wait, the list of who was getting a commuted sentence kept getting revised and no one bothered to tell the president? Because unless that autopen is a Transformer in disguise, it isn’t going to be scrutinizing any last-minute additions.

The idea that staff were given loose guidelines and selected which felons fit Biden’s criteria helps explain these egregious decisions. If a felon met the president’s described criteria, apparently that lucky felon was in, regardless of likely controversy, the interests of the victims or other factors.

Legally and constitutionally, a president’s signature with an autopen is indistinguishable from them picking up a pen and writing their own name. Twenty years ago, the White House Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush declared in a memo, “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 I, Section 7 by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.”

But that assumes that the president is fully informed about what they are signing — or, more specifically, what the autopen was being used to sign.

The more-than-fair question in this situation: Did Joe Biden know what he was signing — or what the autopen was signing? Did he know who was being pardoned or having their sentences commuted? The congressional investigation into this mess is justified.

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