Trump’s Biden ‘void’ pardon meltdown proves he’s still obsessed with the former president

In a stunning display of political gymnastics, Donald Trump is attempting to void the pardons established by Joe Biden.

Trump took to Truth Social to declare that all pardons made by former president Biden were “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT.” Trump went on to claim that Biden’s pardons were written with an autopen – a mechanical device used to automatically write signatures – and that the pardons were invalid because Biden didn’t actually sign them by hand. Trump then went on the allege that Biden “knew nothing about” the pardons in the first place and that “the people that did may have committed a crime.”

The pardons were written to preempt frequently promised acts of retribution made by the Trump administration against its political enemies, and were intended to protect House select committee members who investigated the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol building from being charged with crimes.

Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, the Justice Department maintains that the president is allowed to use an autopen in order to sign official documents. The autopen has been used by presidents for decades, and Barak Obama used the device in 2011. It’s a timesaving piece of technology employed by the office of one of the busiest politicians in the United States, and makes it possible for the White House to issue official documentation even when the president is traveling abroad – as was the case with Obama when the autopen was first used. The device is so convenient, in fact, that Trump himself reportedly used an autopen during his first term in office.

Where did Trump come up with this idea, anyway?

Trump’s post comes on the heels of a report made by the The Oversight Project, which alleged that Joe Biden used an autopen in order to sign documents. While the Oversight Project shared little about the finer details of the report, the organization claimed that they gathered “every document we could find with Biden’s signature over the course of his presidency” and claimed that that all of them save for the document Biden signed to announce that he was dropping out of the 2024 election were signed with an autopen.

“WHOEVER CONTROLLED THE AUTOPEN CONTROLLED THE PRESIDENCY” they wrote online, attempting to give credence to the idea that Biden suffered cognitive decline and was not the one making the decisions in his administration.

Biden’s mental acuity has been a frequent point of attack for the GOP, and a prominent Missouri Republican recently called upon the Department of Justice to investigate the previous president. Missouri AG Andrew Bailey questioned whether or not Biden’s “cognitive decline allowed unelected staff to push through radical policy without his knowing approval. According to Bailey, if Biden were unaware of a particular piece of legislation signed by autopen, then that legislation would be rendered “unconstitutional and legally void.” Bailey’s fears of radical policies pushed by unelected officials are particularly ironic with regard to the Trump administration, considering that an unelected billionaire is currently taking a proverbial chainsaw to the United States’ federal government in one of the most unprecedented acts of political radicalism in the nation’s history.

There is no statute within the Constitution that allows the president to nullify a pardon from a previous administration, meaning that Trump’s pardon of over 1500 people charged with crimes on January 6th cannot be rendered void either, even if he didn’t personally sign them all.

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