No Evidence That Biden Personally Approved Fauci, Family Autopenned Pardons, Says Witness

Forbes Breaking News

At today's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the "Biden cover-up," Theodore Wold, Visiting Fellow for Law and Technology Policy at the Heritage Foundation, discussed President Biden's use of the autopen.

Transcript

00:00Senator Corbin, Senator Schmidt, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity

00:05to testify this morning about how the cover-up of President Biden's mental decline endangered

00:10America's national security and undermined the Constitution.

00:15The U.S. Constitution vests executive power in a single person, the President.

00:20At the founding, the President exercised the executive power through only a small group

00:24of trusted advisors and personnel.

00:26In fact, President Washington had a four-member cabinet.

00:30Today the President directs a Leviathan executive branch with 15 cabinet departments and at

00:35least 4 million full-time executive branch employees.

00:40The executive branch proliferation has a single source of democratic legitimacy, that by order

00:47of U.S. Constitution's Article II, the President is both elected by the American people and

00:52vested with the executive power.

00:54All of it.

00:55Traditionally, the President takes positive actions and authenticates those actions through

01:00his signature.

01:01His signature is required for the most significant actions he may undertake, to sign an executive

01:07order, to take any action invested in him by the Constitution, as in granting a pardon,

01:13and to take the most important action of all, to sign a bill into law.

01:17In all these cases, the President's signature is itself the protection of democratic principle.

01:22When the President signs, he communicates his assent and endorsement of the action he takes.

01:28The AutoPen is a device that signs the President's signature to a document.

01:33The Oversight Project, of which I am a board member, has discovered that the Biden White House deployed

01:38an AutoPen to affix President Biden's signature to pardons, prison commutations, executive orders,

01:46and presidential proclamations.

01:48The Oversight Project's research has found that the Biden White House first deployed the AutoPen

01:52to affix President Biden's signature to a proclamation on Day 5 of his administration, and that there

01:59were at least three different AutoPen signatures in use throughout President Biden's tenure in

02:04the White House.

02:05In June 2022, the Biden White House began deploying the AutoPen to sign clemency warrants and executive

02:11orders.

02:12AutoPen use skyrocketed from there.

02:15We found that of the 51 clemency warrants issued during the Biden presidency, over half,

02:2032 in total, were signed with an AutoPen.

02:24And these include some of the most controversial acts of clemency of the Biden presidency, including

02:29death row commutations and the preemptive pardons of members of the Biden family.

02:34Dr. Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley, and more that were issued in the final days of

02:39the Biden presidency.

02:41We reviewed President Biden's schedule in his publicly available media and were unable

02:45to find any record of President Biden's personally approving these actions, such as a statement

02:51issued by the President himself to reporters.

02:53In addition, we found that the Biden White House used the AutoPen to affix President Biden's

02:57signature to clemency warrants and executive orders while the President himself was in Washington,

03:02CDC, for at least some of that day, and thus was presumably available to sign important

03:07executive actions.

03:08Finally, we found multiple days where President Biden wet signed a bill into law, but used

03:14an AutoPen to issue an executive order or for other important executive actions.

03:19The Biden White House's widespread use of an AutoPen to affix President Biden's signatures

03:23to documents that exercise executive powers belonging solely to the President poses significant

03:28constitutional, legal, and practical considerations.

03:32Once the President's signature is copied and loaded into the AutoPen, the machine can sign

03:36documents as the President himself would.

03:39To be blunt, by using the AutoPen, anyone can sign documents as the President himself.

03:45Now, to be clear, I'm not here today to suggest that the AutoPen is bad.

03:50It's just technology.

03:51I'm here today because of questions concerning President Biden's capacity and whether the

03:56AutoPen was used to usurp presidential power or to conceal the President's decline.

04:02As the sitting President's mental acuity declined, potentially to the point of incapacitation,

04:08his administration's expansion of the powers of the presidency raises more questions than

04:12answers.

04:13Any investigation into this matter should focus not only on whether President Biden directed

04:17or authorized subordinate staff to take action in certain instances, but whether he had the

04:22capacity to do so at all.

04:24The 25th Amendment lays out clear procedures for what to do when the President is incapacitated.

04:29It was carefully drafted and informed by our nation's history.

04:32The Biden administration ignored it all to aggrandize executive power and push the country further

04:38in their preferred ideological direction.

04:40It is our obligation at this point to get to the bottom of these issues and ask the important

04:46question as to whether or not the AutoPen and other devices were used to cover and obscure

04:51President Biden's mental decline, undermining our national security and also the Constitution.

04:57Thank you for the opportunity to testify this morning.

05:00Right on time.

05:01Pretty impressive.

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