As House Republicans prepare to investigate former President Joe Biden’s health and mental fitness while in office, they are increasingly zeroing in on his use of a so-called autopen to sign certain pieces of legislation and executive orders.
Autopens have been used in the White House to generate signatures for decades, with Barack Obama being the first president to use it to sign legislation. But congressional Republicans — who are largely taking their cues from President Donald Trump — see the use of autopens as a key line of attack as they reopen a probe into Biden’s mental acuity and his ability to do his job as president.
“We’re focused on the autopen,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., told NBC News. “Who was making the decisions? Who was authorizing his signature? Was it him?”
There is no official record of how often Biden used an autopen for official government business. The conservative Heritage Foundation released a study accusing the administration of using an autopen extensively, largely based on the timing of when Biden signed documents compared to when he was traveling.
The Department of Justice’s office of legal counsel issued a memo on the topic in 2005 that concluded that the practice was legal. A federal appeals court ruled as recently as 2024 that the “the absence of a writing does not equate to proof that a commutation did not occur,” when it relates to the use of a presidential autopen.
A former Biden White House official pushed back against Comer’s assertions and defended the former president’s autopen use.
“Any accusation that President Biden was not making decisions is false. President Biden made the decisions about the pardons and the executive orders he issued, and the legislation he signed into law,” the former official, who was not authorized to speak on Biden’s behalf, told NBC News. “It is a well-established and legal practice to use an autopen for a signature after he has made the decision. This clerical mechanism was sometimes used during his Administration as it was in other Administrations going back several decades.”
A spokesperson for Biden declined to comment.
House Republicans’ decision to move forward with a congressional investigation, which is still taking shape, comes in the wake of revelations in a new book about Biden’s cognitive decline and the release of an audio of the former president’s transcribed interview with former special counsel Robert Hur as part of the investigation into his handling of classified documents.
The increased scrutiny also comes at a delicate moment, with Biden revealing over the weekend that he has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones. Yet Republicans are undeterred, and in some cases, only more convinced that the Biden White House was not truthful about the former president’s mental and physical health.
The House Oversight Committee, which will lead the investigative effort, is preparing to hand down a new round of subpoenas to a number of former Biden White House officials. Comer, who helped lead the House GOP’s unsuccessful effort to impeach Biden last Congress over his family’s business deals, has accused the officials of purposely shielding the then-president from the public eye.
Comer said that the committee would be reaching out to people in and around Biden’s orbit as part of its investigation as soon as this week. But it remains to be seen whether there will be any public hearings.
“I’ve always said you get more information in Oversight from depositions and interviews than you do public hearings. … It’s a hard group to manage in public hearings,” he told NBC News. “No hearings ever produce much.”
During the last Congress, Comer’s committee subpoenaed three key White House aides to testify about Biden’s mental fitness: Annie Tomasini, Anthony Bernal and Ashley Williams. They also requested a transcribed interview with then-White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Conner. The Biden administration blocked all four from cooperating with the committee. But the panel is expected to approach that same group again.
Trump has attacked Biden’s use of an autopen, most recently on Tuesday during a trip to the Capitol.
“Who was operating the autopen? This is a very serious thing,” Trump told reporters ahead of a meeting with House Republicans. “We had a president that didn’t sign anything. He autopenned almost anything.”
Trump then later escalated his attacks on social media, calling Biden’s advisers “treasonous thugs” and accusing them, without evidence, of using the autopen to control the presidency.
Trump has claimed that if Biden used an autopen to sign pre-emptive pardons of the members of Congress, staffers and Department of Justice staff that investigated the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol, they may be invalid.
While House Republicans and Trump appear to be aligned in their desire to investigate Biden’s fitness to serve, there is some frustration brewing among congressional committees about how quickly the Trump administration is responding to some of their requests, according to multiple GOP congressional sources familiar with the matter.
The House Oversight and Judiciary committees have long been pushing for the release of the Hur audio. But the audio was first made available through the media, first reported on by Axios on Friday, and is now publicly available.
“We pushed the Hur tape issue all last Congress, all the way to contempt,” said House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. But when asked by NBC News on Tuesday if his committee had received the audio, Jordan said: “Not the actual physical tapes. But they’re out there.”
