Editorials & Other Articles

Source: The Guardian

Trump makes unsupported claim Biden pardons are ‘void’ as he used autopen

President claims without evidence that January 6 panel members’ pre-emptive clemency was not signed personally

Martin Pengelly
Mon 17 Mar 2025 14.35 GMT
First published on Mon 17 Mar 2025 12.44 GMT

Donald Trump claimed on Monday, without offering evidence, that pardons signed by Joe Biden were “void, vacant and of no further force and effect” because they were signed with an autopen.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines an autopen as “a device that mechanically reproduces a person’s signature”

Trump made his claim in a post to his social media platform that used his abusive nicknames for Biden and members of the House January 6 committee, writing: “The ‘Pardons; that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen.

“In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/17/trump-biden-pardons-void