Why Trump is attacking Biden over autopen signatures

For decades, US presidents have used autopens to keep up with the relentless stream of paperwork that crosses their desk.

But it is not just a matter of saving them from hand cramps.

When the president is travelling, time-sensitive documents – such as Bills to keep the government open – may need a signature right away, and it is not always feasible to fly the original documents to wherever the president is.

Still, the use of the autopen has long raised questions, because it opens up the possibility that anyone with access to the device could exercise presidential power, without a clear written record that the president himself approved it.

The latest round of controversy concerns US President Donald Trump’s claim that certain orders issued by his predecessor, Mr Joe Biden, are

invalid because they were signed using an autopen

.

Among the contested actions are a series of

pre-emptive pardons for high-profile adversaries

of Mr Trump. 

Mr Trump has also suggested that aides to Mr Biden may have affixed the former president’s signature to official documents without his authorisation.

In an interview with The New York Times on July 10,

Mr Biden denied the charge

.

“I made every decision,” he said.

Mr Biden added that his use of the signing device for clemency actions was a practical decision because “we’re talking about a whole lot of people”.

The Trump White House, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Congress have all launched investigations into Mr Biden’s use of the autopen. 

Here is what to know about the device that has repeatedly been implicated in presidential controversies. 

What is an autopen?

An autopen is a device that replicates a signature using a mechanical stylus, making the signature appear to be handwritten. 

The earliest mechanical writing device, patented in 1803, allowed users to create a duplicate of the letter they were writing by connecting two pens through a system of levers.

The user would write with the first pen, and the second would move across a second piece of paper in synchrony. President Thomas Jefferson used it extensively, calling it “the finest invention of the present age”.

The technology eventually evolved to the point where a robot arm could duplicate a signature without the user’s involvement.

Those robotic autopens became popular across the US federal government in the 1940s, when Mr Harry Truman became the first president to use one. 

How have presidents used autopens?

At first, US presidents used autopens to sign ceremonial mass mailings such as holiday cards and letters of condolences.

To maintain the illusion that correspondents were getting a genuine presidential autograph, the White House was typically circumspect about its use of the device.

Then, in 1968, Mr Lyndon B. Johnson allowed his to be photographed for a National Enquirer article under the headline The Robot That Sits In For The President. 

In 2005, White House lawyers asked the Justice Department for an opinion on whether the president may sign a Bill by autopen, which no president had done.

The DOJ concluded that under the historical and legal meaning of the word “sign” in the early Republic, “a person may sign a document by directing that his signature be affixed to it by another” and that “the president need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill to sign it”.

What the president cannot do, the DOJ said, is delegate the decision about whether to sign a Bill.

Mr Barack Obama became the first president to sign a Bill with an autopen when, in 2011, he remotely signed an extension of the Patriot Act with the device while in Europe.

In all, he used it to sign at least seven time-sensitive Bills. He also used it for at least 78 pardons in the last month of his presidency.

Mr Trump told reporters he has used an autopen, but for only unimportant papers.

Did Biden use autopens? 

Yes. According to The New York Times, Mr Biden used an autopen on 25 pardon and commutation warrants between December 2024 and the end of his presidency.

He is also confirmed to have used an autopen to remotely sign a short funding extension for the Federal Aviation Administration while travelling in San Francisco in May 2024.

Whether he used the device in other cases is less clear.

On March 6, the Oversight Project, an arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, sparked Mr Trump’s interest in Mr Biden’s usage of the autopen by pointing out that digital records of Mr Biden’s executive orders published in the Federal Register all appear to have the same signature.

However, the Office of the Federal Register said that is true of all presidents: The publication has one graphic image of a president’s signature that it uses on all presidential documents, and Mr Trump’s executive orders, too, would all look like they had the same signature in the register.

The versions archived in the official journal of the executive branch are not images of the actual signed orders.

Is a pardon signed by autopen legally sound? 

During Mr Obama’s presidency, Republicans raised objections to his use of the autopen to sign legislation.

In 2011, a group of Republican members of Congress signed a letter demanding he re-sign the Patriot Act extension by hand and end the practice of signing Bills with an autopen.

However, the Obama administration leaned on the 2005 DOJ opinion to justify the use of autopens, and the practice was never challenged in court.

Pardons present a separate use case from legislation, and presidents are probably on even firmer legal ground there.

A 1929 Justice Department opinion on pardons held that “neither the Constitution nor statute prescribed the method by which executive clemency shall be exercised or evidenced. It is wholly for the president to decide”.

In 2024, a federal appeals court found that a presidential pardon does not even have to be in writing.

The decision – which was issued in a case brought by an inmate who said Mr Trump had verbally promised to commute his sentence – found that “nothing in the Constitution restricts the president’s exercise of the clemency power to commutations that have been rendered through a documented writing”.

A political scientist who assembled a database of clemency warrants issued by presidents since George Washington, the first US president, said it contained a large number of unsigned – but legally unquestioned – warrants. BLOOMBERG