OAN Staff Blake Wolf
3:10 PM – Monday, July 14, 2025
A newly released report has uncovered that former Democrat President Joe Biden’s chief of staff had issued the final approval for numerous preemptive pardons during Biden’s final days in office.
Nonetheless, during a recent interview with the New York Times, Biden still claimed that he “made every decision” regarding the preemptive pardons, and that the autopen was only utilized due to the large volume of pardons.
In Biden’s final weeks in office, the former president pardoned and granted clemency to over 1,500 individuals.
At the time, Biden justified the pardons by arguing that President Donald Trump was “vindictive” and would have “gone after” numerous individuals affiliated with his administration “for no good reason.”
“They’re liars. They know it. They know, for certain. I mean, this is – look, what they, 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,” Biden added.
However, Biden’s assertion that he had final say on every preemptive pardon has since been discovered to be a fabrication, according to the Times report, which stated that Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients gave final approval for the autopen usage on multiple high-profile figures, including former chief medical advisor to the president Anthony Fauci and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.
Rather than approving each name included in the final version of the approved pardons, Biden just “signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence,” according to the Times report.
The report included Biden’s final day in office, Biden reportedly had a meeting with his aides until nearly 10 p.m. to discuss the matter of preemptive pardons.
Following the meeting, Zient’s assistant requested his approval in an email to execute pardons discussed in the meeting, to which he responded: “I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons,” according to the Times.
Meanwhile, President Trump has questioned whether Biden was actually aware of all the names being included in the preemptive pardons due to his sharp mental decline.
Trump argued on Monday that the Biden administration’s usage of the autopen may be “one of the biggest scandals that we’ve had in 50 to 100 years.”
“I guarantee you he knew nothing about what he was signing, I guarantee you,” Trump added.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields expanded further on Trump’s comments, stating: “The same president [Biden] who lied through his teeth to the American people for four years about everything from his health to the state of the economy should not be trusted again.”
“The Biden administration conducted the most egregious cover-up scheme in American politics… The truth will come out about who was, in fact, running the country sooner or later, just as the truth is emerging about the state of Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical health,” Fields told Fox News.
Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, who was convicted on three felony counts relating to his illegal purchase of a firearm in 2018. Hunter also pleaded guilty to 9 federal tax charges in California after failing to pay $1.6 million in taxes between 2016 and 2019, which could have landed him in jail for over 20 years.
Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into the previous administration’s autopen usage back in June.
“In recent months, it has become increasingly apparent that former President Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority,” Trump wrote.
“This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history. The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts,” Trump added.
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