President Donald Trump and top House Republicans are ramping up a sweeping investigation into former President Joe Biden's use of a mechanical signature device known as the autopen, raising questions about the legitimacy of executive actions taken during Biden's presidency -- especially a wave of last-minute pardons signed with the device.
The investigation, led by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), gained traction after the Washington Examiner first reported on Friday about Comer's plans for the committee to investigate whether Biden personally authorized all of his clemency orders and executive actions or whether his aides, acting on his behalf, used the autopen without valid authority.
At the center of the controversy are Republican claims that Biden lacked the cognitive ability to carry out key decisions and that unelected aides may have orchestrated policy behind the scenes. The Justice Department, now under Trump's control, has also pledged internal reviews of Biden-era pardons under newly appointed Pardon Attorney Ed Martin.
A staffer familiar with Martin's plans told the Washington Examiner that Martin "looks forward to being in a position to facilitate congressional inquiries from inside the building and to cooperate with those inquiries, because they're all on the same team."
Comer has made the autopen investigation a new front in the broader Republican effort to investigate Biden's fitness and decision-making while in office.
In a statement after his closed-door announcement of the investigation at the annual Republican National Lawyers Association event, Comer said his panel would commence its investigation into "the cover-up of President Biden's mental decline and use of autopen," even teasing that he believes he knows which former Biden staffer operated the device.
Comer said he plans to subpoena former Biden aides Annie Tomasini, Anthony Bernal, and Ashley Williams, who he says "ran interference" for the president and may have coordinated the use of the autopen.
"Now that Biden's top enablers can no longer hide behind the power of the presidency, we're continuing our investigation to expose the truth," Comer said.
Although Comer has named three former aides to Biden, Kyle Brosnan, chief counsel for the Oversight Project, formerly part of the Heritage Foundation, said House Republicans should consider additional names to subpoena, including those who received the blanket pardons from Biden just before he left office.
"I would hope and expect that the people that received those preemptive pardons are on the deposition list," Brosnan told the Washington Examiner. "They're certainly eligible to be deposed in this situation, and they cannot assert the Fifth Amendment for these pardons either."
Republicans have pointed to Biden's final-week pardons and clemency grants as a focal point for legal scrutiny. Among the figures who received preemptive clemency were former COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci, former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, and members of the House Jan. 6 committee.
Several of the pardons were signed between Jan. 16 and Jan. 19, just days before Trump's inauguration. According to public filings and internal memoranda obtained by congressional investigators, a significant number of clemency warrants were executed using batch-format autopen signatures, raising questions about whether Biden was directly involved in the process.