by WorldTribune Staff, September 9, 2025 Real World News
Joe Biden ignored the pleas of his aides to personally sign official presidential actions and would later outsource decisions on pardons to Kamala Harris, a report said.
Those clemency decisions included pre-emptive pardons for Biden family members as well as commutations for federal death row sentences, according to internal memos.
“The memos were gathered as part of a sweeping review by the Trump White House into Biden’s use of autopen signatures for official business, an inquiry that now raises new questions about whether the former president actually attended four meetings late in his term dedicated to making clemency decisions,” Just the News reported on September 5.
An early memo from the Biden White House shows a day one administration policy to use an “original hand signature” for pardons had been abandoned by Biden’s final year in office, when the autopen was frequently used to sign orders as part of the Biden team’s clemency spree which included preemptive pardons for such figures as Antony Fauci and Adam Schiff.
White House Staff Secretary Jess Hertz’s February 2021 draft memo states unequivocally that senior staff would recommend Biden personally sign “pardon letters” with an “original hand signature,” according to a copy of the document provided to Just the News.
“Based on precedent from the Obama-Biden Administration regarding which documents generally are hand-signed by the President, our recommendation is that as a general rule, YOU personally approve and hand-sign all decisions that require Presidential action,” the memo states.
(The internal memos can be viewed here.)
The Just the News report noted: “By the final year of Biden’s term, a lack of briefing records and contemporaneous meeting notes raises questions about whether Biden was being sufficiently briefed on the decisions in front of him, and whether he was ultimately making the decisions at all, the White House concluded.”
Biden insisted in June of this year: “I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”
However, a draft memorandum circulated by Biden’s own White House Counsel’s office in February 2024 describing the “general pattern” for obtaining approval for clemency actions appears to contradict Biden’s assertion. The document shows that by the president’s last year in office, he was increasingly relying on Harris’s assessment, rather than his own, in the approval process.
“Note: Given the President’s schedule, it can often take days or weeks for the President to review and approve the clemency package,” a Biden White Hosue lawyers’ memo reads. “The Chief of Staff’s office has been helpful in getting the paper in front of him for his review.”
“He previously asked the White House Counsel to discuss the candidates with him, although in the last round the Vice President’s approval was sufficient to obtain his approval,” the lawyers noted.
The Trump White House concluded that this memo shows Biden was effectively “outsourcing” clemency decisions to Harris during that final year.
Further, the Trump Administration’s review found scant contemporaneous evidence that Biden had actually attended four key clemency meetings in the waning months of his term and turned up no record of Biden’s briefing books addressing pardons, commutations, or clemency at that time.
There were four meetings over December 2024 and January 2025 during which Biden was said to have given “verbal approval” for his wide-ranging clemency actions, including commutations for CARES Act home confinement recipients, federal death row inmates, and crack-powder sentencing disparities, as well as Biden family pardons.
However, despite retroactive emails detailing Biden’s presence at the four meetings — which allegedly took place on Dec. 5, December 11, Jan. 11, and Jan. 19 — the National Archives possessed no contemporaneous staff notes from any meeting attendees that could confirm that Biden was present at those meetings or gave verbal approval to those clemency acts.
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