Barack Obama famously uttered that one should never underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to eff things up, and it appears he’s done exactly that in a recent interview.

On July 13th, The New York Times published an edited transcription of a “10-minute” phone interview with former-president Biden, which was conducted on Thursday published Sunday night as Excerpts From The Times’s Interview With Biden on Clemency Decisions. The topic was the autopen.

I’d recommend you read it if only to judge for yourself.  The man’s brain is not functioning at par, and even with friendly editing, his thoughts are jumbled — at best.

(Author’s note:  I read the transcript aloud and timed it using a stopwatch on my iPhone.  It took me five minutes, thirty-seven seconds to read it at a normal, even halting pace (as I expect that’s how it was delivered.).  So almost half this thing is on the cutting room floor.)

In the introductory paragraph to the excerpts, The Times makes this banger of a declarative sentence:

Mr. Biden did not personally sign the official warrants recording those [4,000] decisions; rather his White House staff used an autopen device to do so.

And just in case there’s any doubt whatsoever that ol’ Joe had absolutely no idea who was among the 4,000 acts of clemency, there’s this simple declarative sentence from Joe himself:

The only things that really we read off names for [emphasis added] were, for example, you know, was I, what was I going to do about, for example, Mark Milley?

So why is this a banger of an admission?  Because germane to the validity of a presidential pardon or act of clemency is presidential consent.

Joe Biden argues he conferred mercy upon individuals within a category he prescribed, but that’s not the same as pardoning a class of people who meet a categorical criteria.  For example:  Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers as a class, which is different from pardoning individual draft dodgers. Twitchy describes the difference here:

None of the [Carter] pardon recipients are named individually—they are simply described as a class… And if Biden just did that, the ‘categorical pardons’ would have been just fine.

But, instead, the Biden administration didn’t pardon categories—they pardoned specific people that allegedly met Biden’s criteria.

It’s a subtle but crucial difference. And Biden doesn’t help himself when the Times asks specifically about “who made the clemency decisions.”  He begins with a lie then plunges a knife in it in the very next sentence.  Then a moment later he kills it for good:

I made every single one of those. And — including the categories, when we set this up to begin with. [snip] Yes, I made every decision.

Notice he transitions immediately from “every single one” to “categories” in the very next sentence, seemingly nullifying the assertion that “every one” was accounted for.  The fatal, clarifying blow then comes on the next question, on why the autopen was used:

“Because there were a lot of them.”

See the graphics below for perspective:

And here:

He then tries to rationalize it by reminding the Times that use of the autopen is legal, that Trump himself has used it.  Trump would tell you he uses it only for the vast volume of mail that flows over the transom, not documents which have specifically to do with the use of his presidential powers.

Finally “on granting preemptive pardons to family”: “I consciously made all those decisions, among others.”

So not “consciously” on all of them?  He didn’t “consciously” make every decision?  That’s what this sentence clearly implies.  It’s just another (admittedly) subtle indication he couldn’t name a single one of the thousands who received his presidential mercy.  He’s as much as admitting here he had no “conscious” idea who was among the 4,000.

In a companion piece to the interview, “Biden Says He Made the Clemency Decisions That Were Recorded With Autopen” the Times reports that:

At the end of his term, Mr. Biden reduced the sentences of nearly 4,000 federal convicts and preemptively pardoned politically prominent people he considered potential targets of Mr. Trump for criminal investigations.

The Times describes “tranches,” “batches,” and “blurbs” involving oral decision-making.  Evidently Mr. Biden would “blurb” his consent then aides — who may or may not have been in the room at the time of the “blurb” — who would then, in a kind of game of telephone (and we know how accurate that is) certify that a “blurb” was indeed made, and then proceed to autopen the “batches” and “tranches” of pardons or acts of clemency.

That’s, um… not how it’s supposed to work.  The Times is declarative and clear:

Mr. Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people, he and aides confirmed.

How else do we know that’s not how it’s supposed to work?  Further, how do we know Biden knows this?  (To the extent we can be sure he knows anything at all….)

“Mr. Biden granted Hunter Biden a full pardon in December 2024. It was the only clemency warrant in that period that Mr. Biden signed with his own hand.”

One simply must ask:  Why that one?  Why sign just the one?  Unless it’s a functional admission that you know the way you’ve been doing it all along is suspect?

Joe Biden hasn’t done himself any favors with this interview with the Times.  If anything, he’s made it much, much worse.  There’s nothing in the public record offered up by the Times to indicate that these acts were issued with specific individuals in mind.  In fact, quite the opposite.

The White House counsel clearly didn’t advise Joe Biden to do it the way Jimmy Carter did, which was the proper way to process many thousands of federal charges, so we shall see what the various investigations turn up, but it appears it will just be more evidence of this “blurb” and “batch” stuff which… unsurprisingly for Joe Biden, is a complete corruption of the system.

Image from Grok.