Ian Sams, who was a White House spokesman and senior communications aide to former President Joe Biden, arrived Thursday morning on Capitol Hill for a closed-door, voluntary interview with the House Oversight Committee as part of its investigation into the Biden administration’s use of the autopen.
Sams, who was special assistant to the president and senior adviser in the White House Counsel’s Office, declined to answer reporters’ questions as he entered the Rayburn House Office Building shortly before 9 a.m. He is among a larger list of former senior Biden aides summoned to testify as Republican lawmakers probe whether White House officials usurped executive authority from the former president amid concerns over his mental and physical decline.
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In a June letter requesting his testimony, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) wrote that Sams had been “a first line of defense to spin negative stories about the President and his mishaps” and possessed critical knowledge of “who made key decisions and exercised the powers of the executive branch … possibly without former President Biden’s consent.”
“We’re going to ask him a lot of questions about what he would say publicly behind the podium at the White House, what he would tweet about, and see if he still stands by a lot of those claims made,” Comer said before Sams arrived Thursday.
At the center of the inquiry are questions about the autopen, a mechanical device that replicates a president’s signature. While past presidents have used it for routine correspondence, Republicans allege Biden’s aides may have deployed it on weighty executive actions and mass pardons without his personal consent — a move they warn could amount to a constitutional breach.
The testimony comes on the heels of revelations reported earlier this week that Biden ignored warnings by a senior Justice Department official about the public characterization of his mass clemency grants during his final days in office. Internal DOJ emails, obtained by the conservative Oversight Project and reviewed by the Washington Examiner, showed former Associate Deputy Attorney Bradley Weinsheimer warned the White House that the vague language in Biden’s mass commutations risked freeing violent felons — contradicting public claims that only “nonviolent drug offenders” were implicated as part of the over 2,500 candidates covered in the clemency sweep.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have seized on the post-presidency revelations of Biden’s reliance on the autopen. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) in June demanded records showing Biden personally authorized each use of the autopen, warning that “we should subpoena those documents, and we should find out the truth of who was really running the White House.”
During the 2024 campaign, Sams drew attention in his role as a spokesman for then-Vice President Kamala Harris when then-candidate Donald Trump singled him out by name.
“Sams is just a below-average guy, with memorized FAKE NEWS soundbites, almost all of which are WRONG,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after one of Sams’s appearances on Fox News last year.
Trump has described Biden’s utilization of the autopen as possibly “one of the biggest scandals that we’ve had in 50-100 years,” comparing it to Watergate and beyond. Still, experts say the act of using the autopen is legally sound, while Republicans have deepened their desires to uncover whether Biden always assented to his aides utilizing it, pointing to reports like a July New York Times article that revealed the former president signed off on a method of “criteria” for mass clemency rather than directly reviewing the convicted people.
Biden, in a phone interview with the New York Times, pushed back on those allegations, calling Trump and his allies “liars” and insisting, “I made every decision.” Though he defended the use of the autopen due to the volume of warrants, he confirmed he hand-signed only one: a December 2024 pardon for his son Hunter Biden.
Sams is well known in Washington for his role defending Biden after special counsel Robert Hur’s report, which described the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” He also ran the January 2023 press call regarding the discovery of classified documents at Biden’s Delaware home, which prompted Hur’s investigation.
BIDEN IGNORED DOJ WARNINGS OVER LEGALLY FLAWED AUTOPEN PARDONS
Sams’s interview is expected to last several hours. He is the eighth out of 11 scheduled interviews with high-level aides, including Anita Dunn and Ron Klain, who have appeared before committee investigators in recent weeks.
Comer hinted that more of Biden’s inner circle could be called to testify in the near future, saying, “I think there are a few more people that should want to set the record straight. We’ll talk about that at a later date.”