NBC News cemented itself as one of the most stupid corporate media outlets on the planet this week when it pretended a digital signature on letters and subpoenas compares to President Joe Biden’s autopen scandal.
The dishonest attempt to give Democrats some ammunition against Republicans as the Biden team flounders in the face of further investigation kicked off on Tuesday when NBC ran an article noting that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer e-signed letters and subpoena notices related to the Biden autopen investigation he leads.
“A look at the metadata of the letters shows that they were created by someone besides Comer. And hovering over Comer’s signature in Adobe Acrobat shows that it is a digital image,” the article argues.
That’s some hard-hitting journalism after corporate media spent years with their heads in the sand about Biden’s fitness for office and mocked any attempt to discuss staffers’ weaponization of the autopen.
A New York Times report published this week indicates that White House staffers used an autopen to approve changes to pardons without informing their mentally declining president. The investigation is ongoing, but as of now, there is no proof that Biden approved key pardons like that of disgraced former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci.
If digitally signing important documents in the year of our Lord 2025 is such a scandal, then every elected official ever is on the hook. Even NBC uses digital signatures, most recently to sign off on its latest SEC filings, as reporter Matthew Foldi noted.
NBC itself notes in the article, “the use of digital signatures has been common in Washington for decades, both in the White House and in Congress.” What is not common or routine, however, is for unelected bureaucrats to hijack federal clemency power, which the Constitution specifically grants to the president and the president alone.
Comer using Adobe Acrobat to put the finishing touches on investigative material he’s spent months publicly pioneering is not comparable to White House staffers cutting a clueless president out of an explicitly presidential decision.
It’s an insult to Americans’ intelligence to insinuate that materials carefully crafted with the approval of a member of Congress are even remotely close to the alleged autopen abuse that occurred in the former administration.
Make no mistake, the only reason NBC even considered running such a ridiculous story is that the outlet sincerely believed it could help its political allies avoid further autopen scrutiny and potential punishment by the Trump White House, Department of Justice, and Congress.
The real scandal was and continues to be that a cast of unelected bureaucrats likely ran the country using Biden as their presidential puppet. Even more alarming is the propaganda press, which has rapidly lost the trust of the nation, were more than happy to ignore, obfuscate, and lie for years to make it happen.