President Donald Trump wrote on social media Sunday night that he no longer considered valid the pardons his predecessor granted to people whom Trump sees as political enemies because they were signed using an autopen — a typically uncontroversial method of affixing a presidential signature.
Trump, who specifically took aim at the pardons granted to members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, offered no evidence for his claim, and there is no power in the Constitution or case law to undo a pardon. But Trump’s assertion, which embraced a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory about former President Joe Biden, was a new escalation of his antidemocratic rhetoric.
Implicit in his post was Trump’s belief that the nation’s laws should be whatever he decrees them to be. And it was a jolting reminder that his appetite for revenge has not been sated.
“The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Trump wrote in a post on social media Sunday night. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”
The use of an autopen is not new; it apparently was first used to sign a bill into law at the direction of a president in 2011, when President Barack Obama was traveling in Europe and wanted to sign a piece of legislation that Congress passed extending the Patriot Act another four years.
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