What happened
President Donald Trump early Monday said on social media he was declaring former President Joe Biden’s pardons of members of the House Jan. 6 committee “void, vacant and of no further force or effect” because “they were done by autopen.” The Jan. 6 committee members, he said, would now be “subject to investigation at the highest level.” He provided no evidence Biden’s pardons were signed with an autopen or why that would render them invalid.
Who said what
Presidents have “broad authority to pardon or commute the sentences of whomever they please, the Constitution doesn’t specify that pardons must be in writing and autopen signatures have been used before for substantive actions by presidents,” The Associated Press said. There’s also “no power in the Constitution or case law to undo a pardon,” The New York Times said. Trump was implicitly posting his “belief that the nation’s laws should be whatever he decrees them to be,” and his focus on the Jan. 6 committee members was a “jolting reminder that his appetite for revenge has not been sated.”
The president’s recent focus on autopens can be traced to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, which “heavily perpetuated” the theory that Biden — or one of his aides — used the device to sign important documents, NPR said. Most of the group’s “initial analysis relied on documents in the Federal Register,” which affixes the same digital copy of a president’s signature to every signed document, The Washington Post said. The “hard copies — which would contain the actual signature — belong to the National Archives.”
The “autopen narrative started to fall apart” Monday afternoon, when White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was merely “begging the question” of whether Biden was aware of the pardons, the Times said. After she was “reminded” that Biden had “spoken publicly about them,” she “acknowledged that she had no evidence” for the allegations.
What next?
Moving to “investigate or prosecute” anyone pardoned by Biden “would mark a significant escalation of Trump’s defiance of longstanding legal norms,” The Wall Street Journal said. Trump would “likely lose a legal challenge,” Axios said, but only after subjecting pardoned officials to an “expensive, stressful legal battle.”