President Donald Trump on Tuesday attempted to link former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco to the immigration crisis and former President Joe Biden’s use of an autopen in office.
Trump, speaking to reporters during a wildfire briefing at the White House on Tuesday morning, faced down a number of questions regarding protests and riots opposing his deportation agenda.
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BIDEN AUTOPEN USE IN DC WAS MORE WIDESPREAD THAN PREVIOUSLY KNOWN
The president defended his decision to mobilize National Guard soldiers to assist local law enforcement over the weekend while attempting to shift blame back onto Biden for allowing the immigration crisis to occur.
“As you know, we’re moving murderers out of our country that were put here by Biden or the autopen. The auto pen really did it. I mean, the people — whether it’s Lisa Monaco or whoever operated the autopen — these are criminals,” Trump said. “People are criminals who allow criminals into our country. And I don’t think that Biden knew what the hell he was doing. I don’t think he even knew about it.”
House Republicans have launched an investigation into Biden’s use of an autopen to sign controversial, preemptive pardons during his final days in office. The Senate is taking up another investigation to determine whether Biden was fit for office. And just last week, Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate whether Biden’s senior staff took advantage of his age to take executive action in his stead. However, Monaco was not among the Biden officials targeted by GOP investigators in public.
A DOJ official confirmed to the Washington Examiner that the administration was looking into Monaco in relation to the Biden administration’s decision to apply U.S. Code 1512 in the federal prosecution of hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants. Trump later granted clemency for all of the Jan. 6 defendants on his first day back in office.
When asked about Monaco, a spokesperson for the House Oversight Committee said the panel “will conduct a thorough investigation and many witnesses will be called to provide testimony.”
The first batch of witnesses is showing up for testimony later this month.
Biden leaned on Monaco, who previously served as homeland security adviser in former President Barack Obama’s second term, to oversee the dismantling of Trump’s first-term immigration policies. Trump has blamed Biden’s reversal on policy for the border crisis and the need for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation operation that sparked the Los Angeles protests.
Daniel Turner, president of Power the Future, told the Washington Examiner that Monaco was not on his radar, but that Trump’s naming of her on Tuesday indicated the investigations into Biden are casting a wider net than previously thought.
Power the Future has investigated Biden’s use of an autopen in relation to climate-focused executive actions, and Turner testified before the House Oversight Committee on his findings earlier this month.
“It’s a name I am not familiar with, but it definitely stands out that people are investigating this and they’re trying to track down all the different loose ends,” Turner told the Washington Examiner of Monaco.
“What’s interesting about the autopen is that it is a process crime. It requires unlocking cabinets and getting authorities, and going to specific rooms and turning on machines,” he explained. “So there are a lot of steps in this process, not to mention drafting the documents themselves and getting various personnel on board that this is happening.”
He noted that Monaco’s role at the DOJ was beyond Biden’s White House inner circle at the center of hiding the former president’s health decline from the public, according to reporting from the Original Sin book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios‘s Alex Thompson.
Turner said he suspects Trump dropped Monaco’s name for a reason.
“I think [Trump] must know something that we don’t know,” Turner continued. “If there’s truth to these allegations, it shows that it’s much larger in scope than just the inner circle of the Biden family. … It seems like it’s a pretty wide net of folks who are tied up in this.”
The Washington Examiner reported Tuesday morning that Biden’s use of an autopen to sign official presidential documents was revealed to be more widespread than previously known, according to an analysis of National Archives records carried out by the Oversight Project, a government watchdog group.
WHAT THE POST-BIDEN PRESIDENCY INVESTIGATIONS COULD ACTUALLY REVEAL
That analysis found that Biden used at least three distinct autopen signatures during his term, and even used an autopen to sign a separate presidential document on at least eight days where he also signed other documents by hand. Past reporting indicated Biden only used two distinct autopen signatures. Biden’s reliance on an autopen also increased dramatically as his term progressed. The first use occurred on June 13, 2022, but by his final month in office, virtually all of the final executive actions Biden took were signed via an autopen.
The White House and Biden’s post-White House office declined to comment on Trump’s comments regarding Monaco, who also did not respond to a request for comment.