House Oversight: Biden’s Autopen Pardons ‘Void,’ Urge Bondi to Act

How much is a presidential pardon worth? The Joe Biden of a decade ago might have called it “a big f***ing deal.” The Joe Biden Autopen still insists that nothing’s changed. 

However, the House Oversight Committee has a different valuation in mind. After spending months taking testimony from Biden White House officials and other administration figures, the committee has concluded that Biden lacked sufficient mental capacity to exercise the constitutional authority for pardons and commutations. Clemency actions signed with the autopen are therefore invalid, the committee declared today, and asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to take appropriate action to reverse their consequences:

Former President Joe Biden experienced such “cognitive decline” while in office that it remains a serious question as to whether he was aware of the substance of the various pardons and commutations signed in his name via autopen, the GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee asserted in a letter it sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi, urging her to consider whether that clemency might be invalid and to take action for potential prosecution against some of Biden’s aides.

The committee “deems void President Biden’s executive actions that were signed using the Autopen, and the committee determines that action by the Department of Justice is warranted to address the legal consequences of that determination,” it wrote to Bondi in the letter released Tuesday morning.

The letter was made public alongside a 93-page report outlining the committee’s conclusions from its months-long investigation into Biden’s use of the autopen. It alleged the committee had found “a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline” and “no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him.”

What action does the committee recommend against Biden’s aides? To start, they want Bondi to investigate why they refused to testify by invoking the Fifth Amendment:

The letter specifically asked that the Justice Department further investigate three top Biden White House aides who invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify to the committee: former White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor, and Biden aides Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini.

That might take the Department of Justice into tricky territory. The Constitution protects the right against self-incrimination, which means that silence in an investigation is not actionable. The committee could have forced the issue by providing immunity in exchange for testimony, which would have negated the Fifth Amendment in those cases and required them to testify or face contempt charges. Presumably, the DoJ would not investigate the lack of testimony per se, but rather the implication that they have knowledge of a crime and are at personal risk of prosecution. If they won’t testify due to the potential of self-incrimination, that certainly raises a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, even if the refusal to testify can’t be used as evidence of a crime. 

As for declaring the pardons “void,” that and $5 will get you a café latté at a Starbucks knockoff. Congress has no role in the clemency process. That is (for the moment, anyway) strictly an executive power. It’s not even clear if clemencies at the federal level are justiciable; Bondi could try to reinstate convictions and return freed prisoners to detention, but the Supreme Court has made that path virtually impossible. In Connecticut Board of Pardons v. Dumschat, the court ruled in 1981 that presidential clemency actions “have not traditionally been the business of courts; as such, they are rarely, if ever, appropriate subjects for judicial review.” Even the president who issues a pardon may not have the authority to rescind it. 

The question presented here is whether the clemency actions were ever valid in the first place. Could a court review that issue and reverse pardons? Theoretically, maybe, but courts would likely prefer to stay out of those questions. If they did entertain a Bondi attempt to overturn the pardons as fraudulent, the evidentiary threshold for establishing that kind of fraud would be enormous. It would be nearly impossible while Biden publicly defends all of these pardons as his own work, too. Bondi might find a district court judge to go along with the idea, but given the precedents and the dispute over Biden’s cognitive function, any such voiding would almost certainly not survive on appeal. 

The House Oversight Committee has to know this. They want to establish the historical record of the Biden Regency cover-up and go after those who usurped presidential authority while using Biden as their finger-puppet. That is a worthy goal, but it doesn’t require action from the DoJ to overturn the pardons, and I suspect Bondi understands that. 

The latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today’s show features:

•   A new group on the Left has just diagnosed what ails the Democrats, and … it won’t come as any surprise. 
• Andrew Malcolm and I talk about the warning from the Welcome project that radical politics means radical losses. 
• Are there any moderates left in the party? I’m skeptical, but Andrew thinks one man may ride to the rescue. 

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