A New York Times story published over the weekend showed that Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy was on to something in early June when he raised the issue of the Biden White House’s use of the autopen in relation to pardons.
Former President Joe Biden granted more acts of clemency than any other president in U.S. history, according to the Pew Research Center. During just one term, he gave a total of 4,245, which included 4,165 commutations of sentences and 80 pardons.
By comparison, Obama issued 1,927 acts of clemency over two terms, and Donald Trump issued 238 during his first term.
At a media briefing in early June, Doocy held up the example of four pardons allegedly given by Biden.
“Most of the big ones have the same very neat signatures. We would expect that probably to be the autopen,” he noted. “There is one that looks different. It looks authentic. In fact, if you look at the last name, it almost looks like the president was having a hard time spelling his last name there.”
Doocy pointed out that the one pardon signature that looks different was indeed for Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, which the president issued in December 2024.
“Is this White House of the opinion that the only pardon that would count is one that the president signed himself for Hunter Biden?” the reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
The autopen signed most documents—but Hunter Biden’s pardon looks like Joe’s real signature. Peter Doocy notes some key discrepancies. pic.twitter.com/gfLKq2RBAC
— JOSH DUNLAP (@JDunlap1974) July 14, 2025
“The president is making a good point when he discusses the usage of the autopen. Who was running the country for the past four years?” Leavitt responded.
“It’s still, nevertheless, a very important issue. It was a huge issue that sent the president back to this White House. Americans saw with their own eyes a mentally incompetent president, and they want answers for that, and the president believes they should have them.”
She highlighted that the Department of Justice launched an investigation into the matter.
The New York Times reported that the DOJ is now reviewing tens of thousands of Biden White House emails having to do with clemency actions, and the outlet has obtained some of them.
The Times said that Biden did not personally approve all of the pardons or commutations that he granted, but established categories of people who could receive clemency, and his staff then carried out the decree.
“Mr. Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people, he and aides confirmed. Rather, after extensive discussion of different possible criteria, he signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence,” the Times said.
The outlet offered another example of the loosey-goosey nature of the autopen use, based on pardons granted after a White House meeting on the night of Jan. 19, less than a day before Biden left office.
An aide sent a draft summary of Biden’s alleged pardon decisions by email to now-former White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and White House counsel Ed Siskel at 10:03 p.m.
Then at 10:28 p.m., an assistant to Zients sent a final list to Stephanie Feldman, who managed the autopen, copying others who had attended the meeting in the message.
“Three minutes later, Mr. Zients hit ‘reply all’ and wrote, ‘I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons,’” the Times reported.
Where was Biden in the midst of all this? Probably already in bed. Did he even approve the pardons? Who knows at this point?
He probably did approve at least some of them, because they included preemptive pardons for family members, brothers James and Francis Biden, sister Valerie Biden Owens, and sister-in-law Sara Jones Biden. Also on the list were former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.
“I made every decision,” Biden told the Times during a phone interview last week. He further asserted that he had his staff use an autopen on the clemency warrants because “we’re talking about a whole lot of people.”
The Times confirmed that the former president did at least sign the full pardon for Hunter with his own hand, so Doocy assessed that correctly.
The fact that the latest chapter in the autopen story came out through the Times may indicate that the scandal is far worse than we think.
The Times was the first to report that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was using an unsecured, unauthorized private server for her work emails. The March 2015 headline read, “Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules.”
We later learned that there were highly classified emails on that server, and Clinton didn’t just break some State Department rules. She broke the law, though the DOJ declined to prosecute her.
The Times’ MO is the same. It reports the story in the most favorable light for the Democrat official at the center of the scandal, putting an imprint in the mind of the public that it’s not nearly as bad as the Republicans or anyone else would have you believe. Subsequent facts made public then prove the outlet wrong.
Of course, in the case of Russiagate, the Times took the exactly opposite tack, assuming everything was the worst it could possibly be for Trump. The outlet even got a Pulitzer for it.
We’ll see, but the more facts that have come out so far, the worse it looks for Biden and whoever was running his White House.
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