“Any and all documents, proclamations, executive orders, memoranda or contracts signed by the now infamous and unauthorized ‘Autopen’ order within the Administration of Joseph R. Biden Jr. are hereby null, void and of no further force or effect,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social on Tuesday evening.
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“Anyone receiving ‘pardon’, ‘commutation’ or any other legal document signed in this manner, please be informed that the said document has been completely expunged and has no legal effect,” he said.
However, legal experts say the US President’s move is not enforceable.
So, what documents did Biden sign with Autopen, who will be affected, and is Trump’s move legal?
What documents did Biden sign with his Autopen?
Trump has repeatedly claimed that Biden’s use of the AutoPen, a mechanical device that allows a person to sign without using their hand, was a reflection of the former president’s physical and mental weakness.
According to the non-partisan Pew Research Center, Biden issued a record 4,245 acts of clemency during his four years in office, more than any other US president since the beginning of the 20th century.
Most of these acts were commutations of sentences or commutations of sentences. Biden issued only 80 individual pardons, the second lowest number over the same period, but he is better known for issuing “pardons by proclamation”, which affected an entire cross-section of people.
According to the Pew Research Center, these include amnesty by proclamation for former military service members convicted of violating the ban on gay sex, which has since been repealed, and those convicted of certain federal marijuana offenses.
But it is unclear how many and which of the pardons and commutations ordered by Biden were signed using AutoPen.
Is Trump’s move legal?
Bernadette Miller, an expert on US and United Kingdom constitutional law at Stanford University, told Al Jazeera that Trump does not have the power to reverse pardons or commutations.
“This declaration has no legal effect. Any law or pardon signed by Biden by autopen will remain valid. The only exception will be an executive order that will be effective only until rescinded by the same or another president,” she told Al Jazeera by email.
“Those orders can be undone by Trump, so presumably, this statement would preempt any orders of that type. But the pardon and the law remain valid.”
PolitiFact, a fact-checking website based at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, separately found that “there is no constitutional mechanism for overturning a pardon, and an 1869 judicial decision found that a pardon once granted is final.”
PolitiFact said on its website that the US Constitution also does not specify whether pardons must be signed by hand.
Who can be affected by this step of Trump?
Trump had earlier emphasized that Biden had issued a series of “preemptive” pardons to US legislators investigating the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, which were signed by Autopen.
A mob of Trump supporters, seeking to stop the certification of Biden as president by Congress, had stormed the Capitol and claimed the 2020 election was stolen. Trump and his allies have repeatedly failed to demonstrate widespread fraud in the election.
But the US president and his allies view Republicans who decided to investigate Trump, such as former members of Congress Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, as traitors to their movement.
In March, Trump said on Truth Social that pardons for these legislators were “meaningless, meaningless, and of no additional force or effect due to the fact that they were made by autopen.”
Was Biden the first to use AutoPen?
According to PolitiFact, Biden was not the only US president to rely on the AutoPen.
Similar devices have been used for much of America’s history – although as technology has advanced, so has the nature of autopens.
Thomas Jefferson, the third US President, used what became known as a polygraph: a device consisting of two pens, rigged in such a way that the second could copy the action of the first.
In the early 1960s, John F. Kennedy used a more modern version of the Autopen. More recently, Barack Obama used AutoPens on a few occasions.
PolitiFact also obtained two legal memos from 1929 and 2005 stating that the US President is not required to sign documents by hand.
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