When Should a Presidential Autopen E-Signature Be Used?

 The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns the use of a presidential autopen e-signature. Former President Joe Biden consistently used an autopen e-signature during his presidency, and the question is “Why?”

George Caldwell explained, “An autopen, or signing machine, is a device that reproduces a signature without the signatory having to be present.” If the device can be used without the signatory being present – as it was consistently done by the Biden administration – who was actually running the country? 

Many people wondered over the past four years who was running the country. Even more people are asking this question after a report from the Heritage Oversight Project examined the signatures on major documents. Caldwell wrote, “The Heritage Foundation’s report found that the vast majority of documents signed by Biden while in office employed an autopen” including “Biden’s last-minute pardons of his family members, Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, and the members of the Jan. 6 Committee.”

“We gathered every document we could find with Biden’s signature over the course of his presidency,” reads a Heritage Oversight post on X.

“All used the same autopen signature except for the announcement that the former president was dropping out of the race last year.”

The report also found that some of the autopen-signed documents “pardoned six criminals (with the exact same autopen signature) while Joe Biden was vacationing and golfing in the U.S. Virgin Islands.”

These documents all say that they were signed “at the city of Washington.”

Some Republican senators – such as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) considered the findings of the Heritage Oversight report to be significant. Others – such as Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) did not think the finding was important. Ricketts said that e-signatures were “a pretty standard process in a lot of offices.”

But Mike Howell, executive director of Heritage’s Oversight Project, says that Biden’s consistent use of an autopen is far different than a senator using it.

“No president has ever used the autopen so prolifically as President Biden,” Howell said.

“We’re trying to figure out who was actually exercising the authority of the president. And it appears that the autopen was used as a device to hide the responsibility from the American people,” he said.

“It’s functionally and categorically different for a senator to use an autopen to send a thank-you note to the Girl Scouts than it is for a staff t the White House to use the autopen instead of the president’s authority to sign a pardon.”

Howell added: “Only the President of the United States can sign a pardon. And the question remains whether Biden even had the cognitive ability to delegate his signature authority. Additionally, whether it’s even legal to do that for documents that only the presidents can sign.”

Howell and numerous other people are hoping that “this question is litigated in the courts.” “I think that the January 6^th committee members and staff and Gen. Milley and others, they have some funky pardons that are about as valid as a three-dollar bill. And Congress and others … need to figure out who is actually the president over the last four years.”