Former president Joe Biden “did not individually approve” the names of thousands of federal convicts granted clemency, instead allowing his staff to finalize the sweeping pardons and commutations using an autopen, the New York Times reported Sunday after reviewing White House internal emails.
“Mr. Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people, he and aides confirmed,” the Times reported. “Rather, after extensive discussion of different possible criteria, he signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence.”
After Biden approved general criteria for clemency, the Bureau of Prisons submitted updates on individual inmates, leading to changes to the final list, a former aide told the Times.
“Rather than ask Mr. Biden to keep signing revised versions, his staff waited and then ran the final version through the autopen, which they saw as a routine procedure,” the Times reported based on its interview with the aide.
According to the Times report, Biden’s White House staff secretary, Stefanie Feldman, managed his autopen and relied on secondhand accounts of Biden’s oral instructions about the clemency orders. Aides drafted the written accounts based on information relayed to them by senior advisers who met with Biden.
The revelation comes as President Donald Trump has ordered his White House counsel and attorney general to investigate Biden’s mental decline and whether Biden’s aides used the autopen without the former president’s approval.
Near the end of his term, Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 4,000 federal convicts. Among them was Josephine Virginia Gray, who in 2002 was sentenced to 40 years in prison for murdering two husbands and a boyfriend for insurance money between 1974 and 1996, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Recent reports have shed light on Biden’s mental and physical decline while in the White House. Biden appeared “extremely exhausted” and “unaware of what was happening in his own campaign” ahead of his debate last June with Trump, longtime aide Ron Klain said, according to Chris Whipple’s book Uncharted. Klain had to cut short the two mock debates he had organized for Biden and was “struck by how out of touch with American politics” the then-president was.
Former White House physician Kevin O’Connor—who gave Biden clean bills of health throughout his term—refused to testify last week before House Republicans.
Biden told the Times last week that he “made every decision,” saying that he asked his staff to use an autopen on the clemency warrants because “we’re talking about a whole lot of people.”
