President Trump wrote on social media on Sunday night that he no longer considered valid the pardons his predecessor granted to members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol, and a range of other people whom Mr. Trump sees as his political enemies, because they were signed using an autopen device.
There is no power in the Constitution or case law to undo a pardon, and there is no exception to pardons signed by autopen. But Mr. Trump’s assertion, which embraced a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory about former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was a new escalation of his antidemocratic rhetoric. Implicit in his post was Mr. Trump’s belief that the nation’s laws should be whatever he decrees them to be. And it was a jolting reminder that his appetite for revenge has not been sated.
“The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on social media on Sunday night. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”
The use of autopen is an ordinarily uncontroversial aspect of governance; it apparently was first used to sign a bill into law at the direction of a president in 2011, when former President Barack Obama was traveling in Europe and wanted to sign a piece of legislation that Congress passed extending the Patriot Act another four years.
After Mr. Trump posted about the autopen and the pardons Sunday night, a reporter in the traveling press pool on Air Force One asked him to elaborate, and he seemed to briefly back away from the extraordinary idea he had just posted.
Would other things Mr. Biden signed as president using an autopen also be considered null and void, he was asked.
“It’s not my decision,” Mr. Trump said. “That would be up to a court. But I would say that they’re null and void, because I’m sure that Biden didn’t have any idea that it was taking place.”
In the final hours of Mr. Biden’s presidency, he granted a wave of pre-emptive pardons to relatives; all members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on Congress, including Liz Cheney, a former congresswoman and the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney; and some of Mr. Trump’s most high-profile foes, including Gen. Mark A. Milley and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.
Rampant online discussion and theorizing about the Biden administration’s use of autopen, fueled by right-wing pundits, chiefly put forward conspiracy theories that aides to Mr. Biden were abusing it to do all sorts of things under the nose of an out-of-it chief executive. The pinned post on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social profile is a meme depicting a framed picture of an autopen hanging on a wall in the place where a portrait of the 46th president ought to be. (Elon Musk reposted the meme to his 219 million followers, adding a bull’s-eye emoji and a crying laughing emoji.)
Devlin Barrett contributed reporting.
