Trump orders investigation of Biden and his aides

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump ordered his White House counsel and the attorney general Wednesday to investigate former President Joe Biden and his staff in Trump’s latest attempt to stoke outlandish conspiracy theories about his predecessor.

In an executive order, Trump put the power and resources of the federal government to work examining whether some of Biden’s presidential actions were legally invalid because his aides had enacted those policies without his knowledge.

The executive order came after Trump shared a social media post over the weekend that claimed Biden had been “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone, following a pattern of suggestions by the president and his allies that Biden was a mentally incapacitated puppet of his aides.

The former president called such claims “ridiculous and false” in a statement Wednesday after the order’s release.

“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency,” he said. “I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation and proclamations.”

The order comes after disclosure in recent weeks that Biden, 82, had received a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer and in the wake of renewed scrutiny of his health during his presidency.

Since his return to office, Trump has embarked on a campaign of retribution against his perceived enemies, with Biden as a key target. He has moved to strip Biden’s security clearance and ordered investigations into the Biden administration’s handling of a range of issues.

But the ordered inquiry into a conspiracy theory about the former president himself was a startling escalation.

“The White House issued over 1,200 presidential documents, appointed 235 judges to the federal bench, and issued more pardons and commutations than any administration in United States history,” the executive order said, after asserting that “former President Biden’s aides abused the power” of his office.

A central claim of the conspiracy theory, as described by Trump himself, is that Biden’s use of the autopen system — which reproduces a person’s signature to be affixed to official documents — can legally invalidate those documents.

Trump has claimed, for example, that some pardons Biden had made during his time in office were invalid because they were signed using an autopen. (There is no power in the Constitution or case law to undo a pardon.)

Trump has acknowledged that his administration uses the autopen system on occasion. But his executive order asserts without evidence that the Biden administration’s own use of the system may have “implications for the legality and validity” of some of Biden’s actions as president.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had weighed in on this issue at the request of President George W. Bush in 2005.

Howard C. Nielson Jr., the top official at the Office of Legal Counsel, concluded that “the president need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law.” He added that the president could instead direct “a subordinate to affix the president’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.”

Nielson is now a U.S. District Court judge in Utah, nominated to the position by Trump during his first term.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2025 The New York Times Company