‘Has Trump not used autopen?’ was one trending query on social media after the president threatened Joe Biden with perjury, further stating that all documents signed by autopen in the previous administration were ‘terminated’. Trump did not get into details.
This is not the first time Trump has criticized Biden’s alleged use of autopen, especially to sign pardons and executive orders. “Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect,” Trump said on social media.
“I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally.”
What is an autopen?
An autopen is a machine designed to produce an exact copy of someone’s handwritten signature. The device holds a pen and traces a stored sample, allowing it to recreate the signature automatically. US presidents, Donald Trump included, have relied on autopens for years. Unlike rubber stamps or digital signatures on PDFs, an autopen physically writes the signature in ink.
Has Trump used an autopen?
Trump has previously clarified that it should be used ‘only for very insignificant documents’. He explained that an autopen might be used for something like sending a friendly note to a child, since the White House receives “thousands and thousands of letters, messages of support, letters for young people, from people who are ill, and so on.”
But he argued that relying on an autopen for formal actions, ‘pardons and all the important things he signed with it’, was, in his view, unacceptable.
Conservative legal commentator Ed Whelan said on social media that Trump was free to revoke executive orders, whether or not Biden personally signed them.
“But he doesn’t have the same freedom with respect to ‘anything else’ (e.g., bills enacted by Congress, pardons) that Biden directed be signed by autopen.”
The Justice Department in 2005 said the president does not need to sign a bill by hand and can direct an official “to affix the president’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.”
(With AFP inputs)
‘Trump uses autopen…’: New claims after Biden threatened with perjury over executive orders
