Biden officials raised concerns with how he issued pardons, used autopen
axios.com
High-ranking Biden administration officials repeatedly questioned and criticized how the president's team decided on controversial pardons and allowed the frequent use of an autopen to sign measures late in his term, internal emails obtained by Axios show.
Why it matters: The messages are the latest signs of the chaos surrounding the 82-year-old former president during the final weeks of his administration, in two areas that are now being investigated by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee.
President Trump has cited Biden's process in issuing pardons to try to justify many of his own controversial pardons or commutations on behalf of donor-connected supporters and others who were imprisoned for trying to overturn the 2020 election.
How it happened: After the political backlash to President Biden pardoning his son Hunter last Dec. 1, the White House began pushing to find more people to grant clemency to, according to people familiar with the internal dynamics.
"There was a mad dash to find groups of people that he could then pardon — and then they largely didn't run it by the Justice Department to vet them," a person familiar with the process told Axios. Biden granted clemency to more people than any president in U.S. history — 4,245 people. More than 95% of those actions occurred in the final 3½ months of his presidency, according to Pew Research. Many of those actions, including pardoning other members of his family on his last day in office, were signed using an autopen — a computerized version of the president's signature that didn't require him to physically sign the document.
The intrigue: Biden's pardon of his family members went through a unique process.
Near the beginning of his presidency in 2021, incoming staff secretary Jess Hertz wrote a memo to Biden, citing precedent from the Obama administration to argue his original signature should still be used for "pardon letters."
By 2025, Biden had opted for the autopen to pardon five members of his family — including his brother and sister, who had been accused of leveraging the Biden family name for financial benefit. The decision to do so was made in a meeting that included First Lady Jill Biden's top aide Anthony Bernal, according to internal emails.
An email from Biden's chief of staff, Jeff Zients, at 10:31pm the night of Jan. 19 — less than 14 hours before Biden was to leave office — confirmed the use of the presidential autopen for those pardons.
"I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all the following pardons. Thanks, JZ," the email from Zients' account said.
The order came from Zients' email address, but he didn't personally send it.
Zients' aide Rosa Po, who had access to Zients' email account, wrote and sent the authorization of the president's autopen to senior White House officials on Zients' behalf.
"He spoke to Rosa at the time, and he authorized her to send that email, which she sometimes did, but only with his permission," according to a person close to Zients.
Several senior Justice Department officials raised objections about the clemency process with the White House Counsel's office, which was led by Ed Siskel. He helped steer the clemency process in the administration's final months and did not respond to a request for comment.
On Jan. 17, just three days before leaving office, Biden granted 2,490 commutations — the most ever by a president on a single day. Biden said they were for people "convicted of nonviolent drug offenses who are serving disproportionately long sentences."
Biden boasted: "With this action, I have now issued more individual pardons and commutations than any president in U.S. history."
The next day, senior Justice Department ethics attorney Bradley Weinsheimer penned a scathing memo stating that calling the clemency recipients nonviolent was "untrue, or at least misleading."
Weinsheimer continued: "Unfortunately and despite repeated requests and warnings, we were not afforded a reasonable opportunity to vet and provide input on those you were considering."
He proceeded to list some of those with violent crime records to whom Biden had given clemency — including a man who had pleaded guilty to charges related to murder after killing a woman and her 2-year-old daughter, after the mother threatened to reveal his drug-dealing business to law enforcement.
Weinsheimer said the DOJ had marked the man as "problematic," but Biden commuted his sentence anyway. "I have no idea if the president was aware of these backgrounds when making clemency decisions," Weinsheimer wrote.
Weinsheimer, who worked at DOJ for 34 years, resigned in protest in February after Trump's appointees reassigned him from his ethics-focused post.
Other DOJ officials also objected to processes the Biden White House used during his final months in office.
Liz Oyer, a Justice Department pardon attorney, expressed anger about the White House's interference with death row inmates.
She wrote that Biden's White House lawyers asked DOJ not to request the views of the murder victims' families if the department hadn't already done so. That included 10 death row inmates who hadn't filed for clemency before Biden considered it.
After the extent of Biden's clemency actions became clear, Oyer wrote an apologetic email to U.S. attorney offices, according to multiple people who have seen the email.
The Trump administration dismissed Oyer after she raised concerns about the Trump team's pardon process, according to her own account.
What they're saying: Asked about the process for clemency, Biden told The New York Times in July: "I made every decision."
Biden said he used the autopen only for the thousands of commutations and pardons because "we're talking about a whole lot of people."
That explanation is undermined by records that indicate Biden only had to sign a few documents for every large group of people he granted clemency.
Zoom out: Internally, some senior Biden White House officials pushed back on the frequent requests to use the autopen.
Biden White House staff secretary Stef Feldman, who was in charge of the West Wing paper flow, repeatedly asked for more details and confirmation of the president's intentions with the autopen — including when it came to clemency, according to several emails Axios obtained.
"When did we get [Biden's] approval of this?" she asked on Jan. 7, after being asked to use the autopen for an executive order.
On Jan. 16, when told to use the autopen to commute several cases related to crack-cocaine sentences, Feldman wrote back: "I'm going to need email from [Rosa Po] on original chain confirming [Biden] signs off on the specific documents when they are ready."
Tom |
