Tag: biden autopen
Biden Used Autopen, But How Many January 6 Pardons Did Trump Fail To Sign At All?

Biden Used Autopen, But How Many January 6 Pardons Did Trump Fail To Sign At All?

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee claimed that former President Joe Biden’s executive actions and pardons issued by autopen should be declared “null and void” — bolstering a claim pushed by President Donald Trump and endorsed by right-wing media. Meanwhile, multiple people Trump pardoned for charges related to January 6 said in podcast appearances earlier this year that their pardons didn’t include Trump's signature at all.

On October 28, the House Oversight Committee released a report on Biden’s mental fitness when he issued actions signed by autopen, claiming that Biden “experienced significant mental and physical decline during his presidency,” and thus Attorney General Pam Bondi should review whether Biden’s pardons are legitimate.

Oversight Chairman James Comer claimed that the autopen actions should be “null and void.” ABC News noted that “Comer’s comments echo some of President Donald Trump's remarks about Biden’s use of autopen -- including saying that the pardons Biden approved should be voided because they were signed using an autopen.”

Trump’s claim had also spread widely in right-wing media.

However, on the May 14 edition of the Bobby Pickles Podcast, Troy Garrett — who pleaded guilty in December 2024 to a felony count related to his conduct at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and was reportedly a recipient of one of Trump’s mass pardons of January 6 participants — said that his pardon has no signature at all.

Presidential pardon certificate for Troy Vincent Garrett, lacking Donald Trump signatureScreenshot from Bobby Pickles' Podcast

Speaking with host Robert Piccirillo (also known as “Bobby Pickles”), Garrett said in response to Trump’s claim about Biden and the autopen, “You didn’t even autopen my pardon, bro. You didn’t even, like, spit on it,” adding, “You didn’t even sign mine, bro. So what are you talking about, bro? What are you talking about, Trump?”

Piccirillo also noted that he previously interviewed Gina Bisignano, a reported recipient of one of Trump’s January 6-related pardons, and “nobody signed her pardon either.” Bisignano was convicted, but not formally sentenced, for some federal charges for participating at the protest at the Capitol on January 6. During her appearance, she showed her pardon on screen, and it did not appear to have any signature on it.

As right-wing media and Republicans attack Biden’s use of autopen for pardons, January 6 participants say some Trump pardons were not signed at all www.mediamatters.org

ROBERT PICCIRILLO (HOST): You were pardoned, right? You received a pardon?

GINA BISIGNANO (GUEST): Yes I was. Hold on, let me show it to you. Robert, nothing could be worse. OK? This is my pardon. Nothing could be worse.

PICCIRILLO: Did Trump sign the pardon?

BISIGNANO: I don’t think he did. Right?

PICCIRILLO: Interesting.

BISIGNANO: No — I know. I wanted a signature.

PICCIRILLO: I know. That’s actually — I’m going to have a guy on probably next after you, and he wants to talk about why he received a pardon and there are no signatures on the pardons. And he has, like, some kind of conspiracy about that. So that's why I was wondering if you’re kind of, you know —

BISIGNANO: No. I think it’s because it was so broad. Like, no.

During Garrett’s appearance, he and Piccirillo expressed concern that without the signature, the pardons may not be legally valid and could be voided by Democrats in the future.

“When Trump is out of office, and I don’t have a signed pardon, the Democrats … won’t be able to send me to prison,” Garrett said. “It’ll be past the statute of limitations. However, I was already found guilty in a court of law, convicted as a felon in a court of law, in the federal court of law, in Washington, D.C., of all places, of a felony. And so there’s nothing stopping them from saying, ‘He’s still a felon. He doesn’t get any guns. He can’t vote.’ There’s nothing stopping them.”

ROBERT PICCIRILLO (HOST): You had a gripe about Donald Trump not signing the pardons. That’s really why you wanted to get on today — you wanted to talk about that. And so you received a pardon —

TROY GARRETT (GUEST): Bro.

PICCIRILLO: Just like all these other people, 1,500 people received a pardon. I believe I received a pardon. Actually, I think my case, my case was just dismissed, so I don’t think I was actually technically pardoned. I was just — my case was dismissed. But you received a pardon. I just had Gina Bisignano on. She’s the Beverly Hills Insurrectionist. She was the one that was wearing Louboutin and Chanel boots and speaking out of the [inaudible]. She was leading the charge, getting everybody to go inside. Anyway —

GARRETT: I remember her.

PICCIRILLO: Nobody signed her pardon either. She just had the pardon. She just showed it to me right before you, and I said, “Is there a signature on that pardon?” She said, “Nope.”

GARRETT: How is that valid?

PICCIRILLO: I don’t know, TeeRoy. What do you think’s going on here? Huh?

GARRETT: Well, let’s concentrate real quick —

PICCIRILLO: Since I was not pardoned, can they come back after me? Because I was — because they just —

GARRETT: No, because your statute of limitations will, once Trump is out of office, will have reached its limitations. Me, however, I already pled guilty to a felony. I was already, what do you call it?

PICCIRILLO: Adjudicated guilty.

GARRETT: Yes, adjudicated guilty. At that point, you become a felon. I was just awaiting sentencing. So here’s what I fear. I mean, I was already proven guilty. I was already — I was awaiting sentencing. I was already a felon. At this point, I’m an ex-felon. However, there is nothing that I can — and you know me, bro. I do a lot of research on different things.

There is nothing that protects me from becoming a felon again in the future because he didn’t sign the pardons. Sure, my case was dropped. It was signed by my judge, Rudy Gutierrez or some shit [expletive], that an order of dismissal was signed by my judge.

PICCIRILLO: Oh my God, she used that word twice or three times in the last interview. I’m going to do a lot of bleeping.

GARRETT: But I was already convicted. So, to me, it seems like very uncertain, very unsure about this pardon.

You know, Trump brings up a lot of “Well, Biden autopenned his pardons.” Well, you didn’t even autopen my pardon, bro. You didn’t even, like, spit on it.

PICCIRILLO: Autopen?

GARRETT: Well, you know, Trump has tried to say that Biden’s pardons are invalid because they were all used with autopen. Well —

PICCIRILLO: Oh my God.

GARRETT: You didn’t even sign mine. You didn’t even sign mine, bro. So what are you talking about, bro? What are you talking about, Trump? My man, Trump. I’m supposed to turn myself into prison on May 6, which is, like, I don’t know, 10 days from today. I was supposed to go into prison for five years, 10 days from today.

PICCIRILLO: You’re still supposed to? No.

GARRETT: No, no, no, no. I was supposed to. I was supposed to.

PICCIRILLO: Right.

GARRETT: But the pardon that keeps me out of prison hasn’t been signed by the president.

PICCIRILLO: Is that the deal you took, five years?

GARRETT: Well, I didn’t get a deal, Bobby. I got charged.

PICCIRILLO: You pled the one, to one felony, but that was carrying a weight of five years in prison.

GARRETT: Yes.

PICCIRILLO: You’re getting ready to go do a five-year bid just now? Wow.

GARRETT: Yeah. And the judge told me in court, you know, “I could sentence you to less, but you know you’re looking at five years. The prosecution wanted two and a half, but I can give you a full five. Do you understand that, Mr. Garrett?” “Yes, your honor. I understand that.”

And, you know, so, May 6, I was supposed to go to sentencing and to learn my fate. And, so, but, so what I’m getting at here is that when Trump is out of office, and I don’t have a signed pardon, the Democrats —

PICCIRILLO: We are fucked.

GARRETT: Yeah. The Democrats should be able to — I will not be able to be able to — they won’t be able to send me to prison. It’ll be past the statute of limitations. However, I was already found guilty in a court of law, convicted as a felon in a court of law, in the federal court of law, in Washington, D.C., of all places, of a felony. And so there’s nothing stopping them from saying, “He’s still a felon. He doesn’t get any guns. He can’t vote.” There’s nothing stopping them.

As far as I know, I’m still a felon. I can’t vote because my pardon was not signed.

PICCIRILLO: Wow. That is kind of crazy when you think about it.

Heritage Foundation And MAGA Media Behind Trump's 'Autopen' Claim

Heritage Foundation And MAGA Media Behind Trump's 'Autopen' Claim

The Heritage Foundation and MAGA media laid the groundwork for President Donald Trump’s unprecedented and lawless claim that he is invalidating the pardons President Joe Biden issued to the January 6 House select committee.

Trump cited the committee, particularly its co-chair, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), in the calls for retribution against his foes that were a hallmark of his 2024 presidential campaign. In response, Biden issued preemptive pardons to the committee’s members and staff in the final hours of his presidency.

“Rather than accept accountability, those who perpetrated the January 6th attack have taken every opportunity to undermine and intimidate those who participated in the Select Committee in an attempt to rewrite history, erase the stain of January 6th for partisan gain, and seek revenge, including by threatening criminal prosecutions,” Biden said in his statement on the pardons.

Trump responded hours later by proving Biden correct, promising “action” for the “J6 hostages” while denouncing Biden’s pardons of the “Unselect Committee of political thugs,” who he claimed had been “very, very guilty of very bad crimes.”

He moved quickly to fulfill his promise to the January 6 defendants. Later that day, he granted clemency to “all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection” with their actions that day — handing out pardons to people convicted of having violently assaulted law enforcement and commuting to time served the sentences of those imprisoned for participating in seditious conspiracies.

But Trump waited until after midnight on Monday to reopen his attack on the January 6 committee. The president posted on Truth Social — immediately after praising the golfer he said he had defeated to win his golf club’s championship — that Biden’s pardons for January 6 committee were “hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen.”

Trump continued, in a deranged rant in which he claimed without evidence that Biden “knew nothing about” the pardons, that the members were “subject to investigation at the highest level”:

In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them! The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime. Therefore, those on the Unselect Committee, who destroyed and deleted ALL evidence obtained during their two year Witch Hunt of me, and many other innocent people, should fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level. The fact is, they were probably responsible for the Documents that were signed on their behalf without the knowledge or consent of the Worst President in the History of our Country, Crooked Joe Biden!

That’s not how any of this works, as NBC News made clear in its report on Trump’s posting:

However, the U.S. Constitution makes clear the president has unique executive powers to issue pardons and makes no provision for subsequent presidents to rescind them — for issues relating to the choice of pen or anything else.
Biden and President Barack Obama both used an autopen device to sign official documents, a practice which is legally binding, according to 2005 guidance from the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, commissioned by President George W. Bush.
“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,” the office said, adding that this includes the use of an autopen.

But Trump’s allies have spent the last few weeks creating the pretext for Trump to take such an action against his perceived political enemies, and now the president is adopting their argument. His supporters are primed to accept an investigation if the zealots Trump appointed to lead the Justice Department and FBI move forward.

Trump’s MAGA allies built his case that Biden’s pardons were void

The Heritage Foundation, a MAGA think tank that created the Project 2025 framework undergirding much of Trump’s administration, launched the autopen critique with a March 6 post from its OversightPR account on X (formerly Twitter).

“We gathered every document we could find with Biden's signature over the course of his presidency,” the account stated. “All used the same autopen signature except for the the announcement that the former President was dropping out of the race last year.”

Trump’s media allies jumped on the report and immediately began suggesting that Biden’s January 6 committee pardons might be invalid.

“There is nobody who wants to move past this Joe Biden autopen scandal than Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Gen Milley,” MAGA influencer Rogan O'Handley wrote under his X handle DC_Draino. “If courts start to rule Biden's signatures are invalid, then those federal pardons go out the window."

By March 10, the narrative jumped to Fox News.

“A Heritage Foundation report called the Oversight Project has dug up many of the documents signed — actually signed during the Biden presidency,” Laura Ingraham told contributor Raymond Arroyo on her show that night. “And they report, I guess, that all but one was signed by autopen. Or maybe he was just busy.”

Arroyo replied that “considering that he seemed to be on autopilot for most of his presidency, this is not hard to believe.” He later suggested that pardons signed by autopen might be “null and void,” adding, “You know who's sweating the most tonight? Liz Cheney and the Bidens. This is not a happy night for them.”

On Jesse Watters Primetime the following hour, Trump counselor Alina Habba picked up the story. She said that Biden “evidently signed everything with an auto signature” and, when Watters later suggested Biden “should have handed out more preemptive pardons” to prevent Trump’s DOJ from investigating his political foes, she suggested that Biden’s pardons were void.

“I wonder if those were auto-signed as well, because I would challenge the validity of it. You never know,” she said.

Heritage President Kevin Roberts joined Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt the same night to claim that the autopen usage proved Biden was “incapacitated” and called into question the legitimacy of documents like “the pardons that President Biden made to people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and other terrible Americans.”

The following day, Heritage’s OversightPR account responded to the spate of interest with an update on Biden’s pardons:

We analyzed Biden's Jan. 19, 2025 “pardons” for:
-Biden Family Members
-Anthony Fauci
-General Milley
-J6 Committee
-Gerald Lundergan
They all have the same exact Biden autopen signature

The post triggered more MAGA media coverage.

Newsmax’s Greg Kelly cited the Heritage report on his March 13 show, saying that it raises “questions about the validity of these pardons.”

A few days later, the president himself agreed.

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