President Donald Trump is using analysis from The Heritage Foundation to accuse Joe Biden of not physically signing several documents, including key pardons.
The Oversight Project, a branch of The Heritage Foundation — the think tank that wrote Project 2025 — is claiming that the Biden White House used an automated signature to place Biden’s name on several key documents that happen to counter Trump’s agenda.
According to the New York Post, this is corroborated by an anonymous Biden staffer who it claims took unilateral decisions on what the president was signing by affixing an auto-signature. However, per the newspaper’sreporting: “The Post is not publishing that staffer’s name due to the lack of concrete evidence and refutations by other colleagues.”
The signatures picked by The Heritage Foundation are from the National Archives. The National Archives do not display original copies of documents, but digitized versions.
These copies use a computer-generated signature for where the President signed the document, meaning that online copies of Biden’s signature appear to be auto-signed, but they’re not the original version. There is photographic proof of Biden signing many of the documents that The Heritage Foundation is claiming were signed by autopen.
This is the same for documents from the Trump administration that are on the National Archives site.
Joe Biden in the Oval Office of the White House on Nov. 13, 2023, in Washington. Joe Biden in the Oval Office of the White House on Nov. 13, 2023, in Washington. Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Why It Matters
Donald Trump is using the allegations of an autopen signature to attempt to void the pardons offered by Biden to political opponents of Trump and MAGA.
Even if Biden did use an autopen, the Justice Department (DOJ) in 2005 stated: “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,” so Trump’s argument is not legally valid.
What to Know
Biden offered 11th-hour pre-emptive pardons to the January 6 Committee and Dr Anthony Fauci, as well as to his own son, Hunter Biden, General Mark Milley, and Jerry Lundergan on January 19, before Trump took office. He said the pardons for Milley, Fauci and the January 6 Committee were there to protect them from future political retribution that Trump may take against them.
Now it appears that Trump is attempting political retribution by claiming that the pardons are not real.
Even though an automated signature is legally binding, per a Department of Justice precedent, a CNN article from 2024 displayed how much effort the Biden administration put into making sure the then-president signed bills in person, including flying bills to South Korea and St Croix.
The same article noted that Biden did use an autopen in his presidency to sign a Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) funding bill to ensure that the FAA received the $105 billion authorized to it from a bipartisan Senate bill.
The first president to experiment with an automated signature — as in, a signature that did not require him to physically put pen to paper — was Thomas Jefferson, who used a polygraph device to write letters simultaneously. The first president to use an automated pen for government work was Harry Truman, and the first to use an autopen for legislation was Barack Obama, who used it once.
This autopen allegations are part of MAGA’s larger conspiracy that claims the Biden White House was covering up for his alleged cognitive decline while in office.
What People Are Saying
Jeff Clark, leader of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said on X: “There is a political group that does not believe in signature verification for mail-in election ballots. Unsurprisingly, that same group is fine with one or more aides of Biden controlling an autopen of Biden’s signature, despite Biden clearly having been senile for all or most of his time in office.”
Donald Trump on Truth Social: “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.”
What Happens Next
Whether Trump will attempt to fully remove the Biden-era pardons through his own executive orders remains to be seen. His Truth Social announcement has no legal standing, as the president cannot make legal declarations over social media.
If he does attempt to abolish the pardons via an executive order, that decision will likely end up in court.
