President Donald Trump has ordered an investigation into former President Joe Biden’s actions as president via a memorandum asking “who ran the United States while President Biden was in office.”
The memo alleges that Biden and his aides hid his “serious cognitive decline” during the latter part of his presidency and suggested others had been making important decisions for him.
Biden responded by calling the claims “ridiculous” and “false.”
The Trump administration announced the investigation on Wednesday evening. The investigation will seek to determine if “certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President.”
By calling into question who wielded executive power during Biden’s presidency, the Trump administration appears to be positioning itself to undermine the legitimacy of his executive actions, including pardons, executive orders, and legislation signed into law.
The memo also mandates an investigation into all of Biden’s executive actions during his “final years in office, examining policy documents signed with an autopen, who authorized its use, and the validity of the resulting Presidential policy decisions.”
“In recent months, it has become increasingly apparent that former President Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signature through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority,” the Trump memorandum says. “This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history.”
The memorandum accuses Biden’s aides of restricting “his news conferences and media appearances, scripting his conversations with lawmakers, government officials, and donors,” and calling into question the actions taken during his time in office.
After the announcement, Biden released a statement saying: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.
“This is nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations.”
White House counsel David Warrington has been tapped to lead the investigation, with Attorney General Pam Bondi consulting.
Earlier on Wednesday, Trump foreshadowed the memo in a typically apoplectic Truth Social post.
“With the exception of the RIGGED PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020, THE AUTOPEN IS THE BIGGEST POLITICAL SCANDAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY!!!” he wrote on his social media platform.
The announcement comes on the heels of a Reuters report that Ed Martin, the Justice Department’s pardon attorney, had told staff on June 2 that he had been directed to investigate clemency and pardons that had been granted during the Biden administration, particularly during the final days of his administration.
Democrats went on the defense within an hour of the memo’s release. Congressman Dan Goldman spoke to CNN and called Trump’s investigation an attempt by the president to distract the American public from his numerous personal and political controversies.
“The idea of focusing on President Biden is a way of distracting from Donald Trump’s efforts to completely undermine our democracy, to grift and engage in corruption, and to help out his billionaire buddies by cutting their taxes while taking Medicaid away from the American people,” he said Wednesday evening.
A recurring focus of the memorandum appears to be Biden’s use of an autopen, a device that mechanically replicates a signature.
Use of autopens is not uncommon for presidents nor is it illegal. Previous presidents, including Trump, have used the devices.
During a press briefing on June 3, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified that the Trump administration was not concerned about the use of the autopen, but rather if people other than Biden were using it to sign pardons, bills, or executive orders.
“It’s whether or not the president of the United States knew it was being used, and if not, who was using it in his name, which is clearly, illegal behavior,” she said.
The implication in the memorandum is that the Trump administration may try to roll back Biden’s executive actions if it can establish that Biden was not aware — or did not have the capacity to be aware — that his signature was being used.
“Given clear indications that President Biden lacked the capacity to exercise his Presidential authority, if his advisors secretly used the mechanical signature pen to conceal this incapacity, while taking radical executive actions all in his name, that would constitute an unconstitutional wielding of the power of the Presidency, a circumstance that would have implications for the legality and validity of numerous executive actions undertaken in Biden’s name,” the memorandum says.
The House Oversight Committee is also investigating Biden’s use of the autopen, according to committee chair James Comer. Committee members have requested interviews with former Biden aides and others who allegedly engaged in the “cover-up.”
There is currently no evidence suggesting that anyone other than Biden used the autopen for his executive actions.
Last month, Jake Tapper and Axios journalist Alex Thompson released a book — Original Sin — that alleges there was an effort by Biden’s inner circle to “cover-up” the former president’s cognitive decline in an effort to present him as a viable candidate for the 2024 presidential election.
Tapper, during an interview with Piers Morgan last week, said the scandal may be “worse than Watergate”.
Among the revelations in Original Sin are claims that the former president’s aides discussed the possibility of putting him in a wheelchair, that Biden failed to recognize the Hollywood star George Clooney at a fundraiser and wanted to testify at his troubled son Hunter Biden’s trial and that Harris’s advisers believed he “f***ed” her campaign.
Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has also hopped off the Biden train for the chance to write about him instead. The publisher of her upcoming book announced that she has left the Democratic Party and will release a tell-all book about her time in the Biden White House.
