Former President Joe Biden, in an interview with the New York Times published on Sunday, said that he personally made every clemency and pardon decision during the last few weeks of his presidency — including those made with an autopen.
However, he and aides told the Times that some decisions for large batches of pardons were based on broad categories that various people fell into, not based on reviewing individuals on a case-by-case basis. Biden said he approved the categories and standards for choosing who to pardon.
“I made every single one of those. And — including the categories, when we set this up to begin with,” Biden said of the clemency and pardon decisions.
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In December, Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, who was convicted on tax evasion and federal gun charges; commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people on home confinement; and pardoned 39 people who were convicted of nonviolent crimes.
In January, he pardoned nearly 2,500 nonviolent drug offenders; on the last day of his presidency, he issued preemptive pardons to potential targets of the incoming Trump administration and to several close family members.
President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have also focused their ire on Biden’s use of an autopen device to sign pardons and other documents, claiming either that the pardons Biden approved are void because they were signed using an autopen, or that it matters who controlled the autopen when the pardons were signed. Trump has said he has used an autopen for some trivial matters, but criticized its use for pardons.
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In June, Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether the Biden administration sought to conspire to cover up his mental state while in office, and to look through Biden’s use of the autopen.
Biden defended the use of autopen.
“The autopen is, you know, is legal. As you know, other presidents used it, including Trump. But the point is that, you know, we’re talking about a whole lot of people.”
“They’re liars,” Biden also said of Trump and Republicans. “They know it … they’ve had a pretty good thing going here. They’ve done so badly. They’ve lied so consistently about almost everything they’re doing. The best thing they can do is try to change the focus and focus on something else.”
He called the furor “consistent with Trump’s game plan all along … if I told you three years ago, we’d have a president doing this, I think you’d look at me in the eye and say, ‘What, are you, crazy?'”
Asked about the Times’ report Monday morning, Trump called Biden’s use of autopen a “tremendous scandal.” The president once again claimed without evidence that Biden wasn’t aware of what was being signed.
“I guarantee you he knew nothing about what he was signing, I guarantee you,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
Biden’s latest remarks come as Trump and Republicans continue to argue that Biden was not the one making decisions to grant pardons or clemencies, or in charge of decisions more broadly during his presidency.
In May, Senate Republicans announced their plans to launch the probe into Biden’s mental fitness while in office, including his use of autopen.
The House Oversight Committee is also conducting an investigation into Biden’s health in office. Last week, Biden’s former White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor briefly appeared before the Oversight Committee behind closed doors, where he declined to cooperate, invoking the Fifth Amendment and asserting physician-patient privilege.
The Times said it reviewed emails from the Biden White House that corroborated that it had put in place a process where Biden made decisions before clemency records were signed by an autopen device. ABC News has not obtained or reviewed these emails.
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For larger categories of individuals being considered to be pardoned, the Times reported, Biden did not approve every single name, but approved what standards would be used to figure out which people would get their sentences adjusted. Biden himself did discuss pardons for higher-profile figures, such as former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, according to the New York Times’ report.
“Well, first of all, there’s categories. So, you know, they aren’t reading names off for the commutations for those who had been home confinements for, during the pandemic,” Biden told the Times.
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“So the only things that really we read off names for were, for example, you know, was I, what was I going to do about, for example, Mark Milley? Mark’s a good guy. We know how vindictive Trump is and I’ve no doubt they would have gone after Mark for no good reason … I told them I wanted to make sure he had a pardon because I knew exactly what Trump would do — without any merit, I might add,” Biden told the Times.
The Times said there were some small changes made to the lists of people set to receive pardons after Biden had approved the category based on new information from the Bureau of Prisons, and that aides did not bother to run the revisions by Biden before putting the pardons through autopen, although the aides saw that as routine.
Biden further defended the decision to pardon his family members because Trump would “go after me through my family,” he told the Times.
“I know how vindictive he is. I mean, everybody knows how vindictive he is,” Biden told the Times. “So we knew that they’d do what they’re doing now. And my family didn’t do anything wrong … and all it would do is, if they, if he went after them, would be, is run up legal bills.”
