In a jaw-dropping revelation that should shake every American to their core, former Biden advisor Neera Tanden has admitted under oath that she — not Joe Biden — was in control of the president’s autopen for nearly two years.
A top White House aide, utterly unelected and unknown to most of the country, had the authority to affix the President’s signature to official documents, including sweeping executive orders and controversial pardons, all while the nation was led to believe these were the deliberate actions of the commander-in-chief himself.
“As staff secretary, I was responsible for handling the flow of documents to and from the president,” she testified. “I was also authorized to direct that autopen signatures be affixed to certain categories of documents."
This isn’t some minor bureaucratic quirk. Tanden’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee exposes a chilling reality: for a significant stretch of Biden’s presidency, the man who was supposed to be in charge may have been little more than a figurehead, with crucial decisions and official acts rubber-stamped by staffers operating behind the scenes.
Tanden, who served as Senior Advisor and later as Staff Secretary, openly acknowledged that from October 2021 to May 2023, she was authorized to direct the use of the autopen on Biden’s behalf.
"We had a system for authorizing the use of the autopen that I inherited from prior administrations," Tanden claimed. "We employed that system throughout my tenure as staff secretary.”
Despite her admission, she insists there was no abuse of the autopen or a cover-up.
The autopen has been around since the 1950s, but its constitutional legitimacy has always been on shaky ground. Barack Obama was the first to test those limits in 2013, signing a bill into law from his Hawaiian vacation, leaning on a dusty 30-page memo from the Bush-era legal team to cover his bases. But what we’re seeing now is something entirely different. Never before has the autopen been used under such a cloud of secrecy — or at a time when the sitting president’s mental capacity is so openly questioned. The Trump administration is not using the autopen to sign legally binding documents.
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The Oversight Project — first to expose the autopen scandal months ago — recently found that a troubling number of executive orders were autopenned without explanation, despite Biden being available to sign them in person. Even more disturbing: on at least eight separate occasions, Biden hand-signed legislation but opted to use the autopen for executive orders on the very same day. The pattern extends to clemency actions as well: of 51 warrants issued, 32 bore the autopen signature, all while Biden was reportedly in town and fully capable of signing them himself. There is ample evidence that Biden was not even aware of some of the executive orders signed in his name.
“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false,” a statement attributed to Joe Biden claimed earlier this month in response to the congressional investigation, and dismissing the investigation as a distraction by Trump and Republicans.
Tanden’s admission marks only the first crack in the biggest presidential scandal in history. Though Biden is out of office, the shadow of his covert and unconstitutional delegation of presidential power lingers like a dark stain on his presidency and his enablers in the Democratic Party. The irony is bitter: the very Democrats who claim to be the staunch defenders of democracy quietly looked the other way as the president abandoned his duties and undermined the rule of law from within.
The full extent of this betrayal is only beginning to surface, and its consequences will haunt American democracy for years to come.
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