The Department of Justice quietly dropped its investigation into former President Biden's use of an autopen to sign official documents, including pardons and clemencies, after prosecutors could not build a criminal case. The probe, led by U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro's office, was shelved in recent months without ever producing charges, according to The New York Times, which cited three people briefed on the inquiry.
The investigation stemmed from an order by President Trump directing Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House counsel to examine Biden's use of the mechanical signature device. That order specifically called for scrutiny of "the circumstances surrounding Biden's purported execution of the numerous executive actions during his final years in office, examining policy documents signed with an autopen, who authorized its use, and the validity of the resulting Presidential policy decisions."
According to The Hill, it also directed Bondi to investigate "whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden's mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President."
The probe went nowhere. And the real story isn't that it ended. It's what the investigation revealed about the Biden White House on the way down.
Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ran their own parallel investigation and released a 100-page report in October calling on the DOJ to investigate Biden's alleged autopen use. The report's central finding is worth noting carefully: it failed to pinpoint a specific incident where an autopen was used without Biden's sign-off. At the same time, it claimed that Biden verbally authorized the autopen to be used.
So the committee's own work established that Biden gave verbal authorization for the device. That's not a crime. It may be sloppy governance. It may raise legitimate questions about whether a president in cognitive decline was meaningfully engaged with the documents bearing his signature. But verbal authorization is still authorization.
The committee produced 100 pages and could not find a single instance where someone pressed the button without Biden's knowledge. That's a significant fact, and it likely explains why career prosecutors in Pirro's office struggled to move forward. You can't build a criminal case on the suspicion that something improper might have happened when your own allies' investigation says it didn't.
Biden, for his part, dismissed the entire effort. He told The New York Times in July that his accusers were "liars. They know it." He explained that the autopen was used to sign warrants because there "were a lot of them."
Then he offered this:
"They've lied so consistently about almost everything they're doing. The best thing they can do is try to change the focus and focus on something else. And this is a — I think that's what this is about."
Note the stumble mid-sentence. This is the man whose mental acuity was supposedly beyond question. Biden's own defenders spent years insisting he was sharp as ever, and every unscripted moment told a different story. The autopen questions were never frivolous. The American public watched a president visibly decline in real time while his staff and party insisted nothing was wrong.
The fact that prosecutors couldn't turn that deception into a criminal charge doesn't mean the deception didn't happen. It means the deception was political, not statutory. There's a difference, and it matters.
Lost in the procedural collapse of the autopen probe is the substance underneath it: Biden signed several pardons and clemencies during his time in office that deserve continued scrutiny, regardless of how his signature got on the paper. He pardoned his son, Hunter Biden. He granted clemency to Leonard Peltier. He pardoned members of Congress who served on the Jan. 6 committee. And most of his last-minute clemencies went to people the White House described as nonviolent drug offenders.
Trump argued that Biden's pardons should be voided due to the autopen concerns. That argument may have lost its prosecutorial vehicle, but the underlying question hasn't gone away: Was a cognitively diminished president meaningfully directing the most consequential unilateral power a president holds?
Trump put the question plainly last year:
"And you know what, they ought to find out who was using that autopen. Because whoever that person was, he or she was like the President of the United States … I think a President should sign it, not use an autopen. And we're going to find out whether or not he knew what the hell he was doing."
The DOJ couldn't answer that question with an indictment. That doesn't mean the answer is reassuring.
The autopen saga exposes a structural problem that predates Trump's order and will outlast this particular probe. For the better part of two years, the Democratic Party, Biden's senior staff, and a cooperative press corps maintained a fiction about the president's fitness. When the fiction finally collapsed, it did so on a debate stage in front of 50 million Americans, and the same people who had been lying pivoted overnight to pushing Biden aside.
No one was held accountable for that coordinated deception. Not a single aide. Not a single spokesperson. Not a single journalist carried the water. The autopen investigation was, in part, an attempt to find a legal hook for that accountability. The hook wasn't there. But the offense was real, and the public knows it.
The lesson here isn't that Biden did nothing wrong. The lesson is that what Biden's inner circle did wrong was perfectly legal. They propped up a diminished president, let a machine sign his name, told the country he was fine, and walked away clean.
That's not exoneration. That's a gap in the law.