In March of this year, I wrote about President Donald Trump asserting that his predecessor's preemptive pardons of the January 6 Committee -- including Liz Cheney, Jamie Raskin, and Adam Schiff -- were invalid. Jake Tapper said President Trump did not have the power to do this because the Constitution does not give subsequent presidents the power to undo pardons.
Fair point.
But what the Constitution does grant is the power for the President -- and the President alone -- to issue pardons. But the president has to be aware of those pardons.
The question is: was Joe Biden aware?
It seems he was not.
PARDON? Biden staffers admit the former president was never aware of the full list of individuals they pardoned with the autopen. Thousands of criminals pardoned were never approved by the president, but instead by officials at the bureau of prisons and his staffers. This… https://t.co/YIrUqztjmt pic.twitter.com/nBQ90bu33i
— @amuse (@amuse) July 14, 2025
In December of 2024, I wrote about how White House staffers worked around Joe Biden's cognitive issues, citing 'good days and bad days' the former president had. Last June, Alex Thompson -- who went on to co-write a book about Joe BIden's cognitive decline with the aforementioned Jake Tapper -- reported Joe Biden was 'reliably engaged' between the hours of 10 am and 4 pm.
Special prosecutor Robert Hur determined Joe Biden's cognitive issues made him unfit to be tried in the classified documents case Hur investigated. In response to his report, Democrats didn't pause to question the fitness of their president. They attacked Robert Hur, with Kamala Harris calling Hur's report 'gratuitous, inaccurate, and inappropriate.'
With the report from the New York Times that staffers were revising pardons and President Biden was unaware of these revisions, I want to revisit this issue. We must revisit this issue.
As my colleague Aaron wrote earlier today:
Now, let’s talk a little about the law. This author wrote a VIP piece discussing the legal issues presented by Biden’s potential incompetency in the context of pardons, called ‘The Question Isn’t Whether Trump Can Revoke Biden’s Pardons. It’s Whether They Were Issued at all.‘ In the piece, we made several points:
First, only the president can issue a federal pardon. This is a duty he cannot delegate.
Second, an autopen can be used to do any act that requires the president’s signature, but only if the president consents to his signature being placed on the document.
Third, if that consent wasn’t given, then as a matter of Constitutional law no pardon was issued.
So if Trump declares one of Biden’s pardons to be null and void for that reason, he isn’t revoking that pardon. He is saying none was issued in the first place.
(And for the record, no president can revoke a pardon, once properly issued.)
That prior piece goes into more detail, but that is the law. And that initial email saying that ‘The president makes the final decision on the final pardon and/or commutation slate’ suggests that they understood this point: No pardon could issue without Biden’s consent.
Once again, where is the GOP?
Shortly before the inauguration, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told Bari Weiss of the Free Press he had an encounter with Joe Biden wherein Biden -- the sitting president -- did not recall an executive order he'd signed less than a month prior.
WATCH:
EXCLUSIVE: @SpeakerJohnson tells @BariWeiss that President Biden hasn’t been in charge for a while.
— The Free Press (@TheFP) January 18, 2025
In January 2024, when Johnson and Biden were alone in the Oval Office, the president couldn’t recall an important executive order he had signed just three weeks earlier.
Johnson… pic.twitter.com/OEbLxKBQBF
That exchange took place in January 2024, six months before Biden was ousted from the race and a year before he formally left office.
Why didn't Speaker Johnson immediately take this story public? Why didn't he, and the rest of the GOP, demand hearings and pressure Vice President Kamala Harris to do her job and invoke the 25th Amendment?
Because you can bet the Democrats wouldn't let President Trump remain in office if he were actually mentally unfit to serve. If it were Donald Trump, and not Joe Biden, who proverbially crapped the bed in the June 27 debate, every Democrat from Chuck Schumer on down to the dog catcher of Podunk, Kansas, would be clamoring to get in front of the cameras calling for his removal from office.
In fact, they've been pushing the narrative that President Trump is suffering cognitive decline since his first term, despite no evidence. In June of 2017, President Trump used two hands to lift a glass of water to his mouth and took his time walking down a ramp. Democrats used this as 'proof' that President Trump was experiencing cognitive decline. In 2018, Jake Tapper had Jamie Raskin on his show to discuss how President Trump was 'unfit' for office and needed to be removed via the 25th Amendment. Two years later, Tapper chided Lara Trump for even suggesting Joe Biden was mentally unwell, telling Lara her comments would hurt the feelings of kids with stutters:
This is a perfectly example of media bias. Thanks Jake.
— MAZE (@mazemoore) February 27, 2025
In 2018 Jamie Raskin was going on TV and calling for Trump to be removed from office via the 25th amendment. Raskin claimed that Trump was mentally unfit to be President.
When Raskin brought his act to the Jake Tapper… pic.twitter.com/QIQGnTItib
And just yesterday, Jonathan Capehart went on PBS to ask why the media aren't covering President Trump's mental acuity in the way they covered Joe Biden's. That would be not at all, of course, but Capehart prefers to rewrite that history.
Yet the GOP, with ample evidence -- including reports from Axios, the New York Times, an entire book by Jake Tapper, and comments from their Republican Speaker of the House -- hasn't bothered to lift a finger about any of this.
Why was Joe Biden allowed to remain in office from July 2024 to January 2025, after he was deemed unable to campaign?
Who wrote the pardons and used the autopen to sign Biden's name?
Are those pardons -- including for Joe Biden's son Hunter -- even valid?
And finally, why hasn't Jake Tapper bothered to ask the most obvious question raised by the very book he's so furiously peddling: If Joe Biden was that mentally impaired, were presidential powers wielded in his name without his knowledge, participation, or consent?
We just lived through the most egregious and massive scandal in American presidential history. This dwarfs Watergate and even the nearest comparable presidential wrongdoing -- when Woodrow Wilson's wife ran the country after his stroke in 1919 -- pales in comparison.
Those aren't my words; that's President Trump speaking.
🚨 TRUMP: “I guarantee Biden knew NOTHING about the pardons signed by the autopen.”
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) July 14, 2025
“The autopen is maybe one of the biggest scandals that we've had in 50-100 years.”
The “pardons” are NULL AND VOID!
Buckle up, Schiff, Fauci, and Cheney. pic.twitter.com/5fw6GpXbrQ
President Trump is the leader of the GOP and he should demand his party act on this latest development in the ongoing question of what took place during the Biden administration.
Because my patience is wearing thin. We deserve these answers, and we deserve a GOP that is willing to play political hardball. Earlier, Rand Paul said he was going to reissue his criminal referral of Anthony Fauci to the DOJ. Charges should be filed against every high-ranking official who received a pardon from Joe Biden -- including Liz Cheney and Hunter -- to trigger a legal challenge against Joe Biden's pardons.
It's uncharted territory, yes. But chart it we must, and we must make sure no future executive can be a quasi-vegetable while his staff runs the country and makes decisions the Constitution says belong solely to the president.
