House Finds Top Biden Officials Used Autopen to Abuse Executive Power as President Declined
by James Lynch, National Review.com, October 28, 2025Top Biden administration officials misused executive authority and took actions without then-President Joe Biden’s authorization as his mental acuity declined, a House investigation found.
President Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and exercised executive authority by abusing the presidential autopen and taking advantage of a lax chain-of-command, according to a report released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee.
“The Biden Autopen Presidency ranks among the greatest scandals in U.S. history. As President Biden declined, his staff abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy to effect executive actions that lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized,” the report reads.
“The Committee has found that there was, in fact, a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline and that there is no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him,” the report adds.
The Biden White House worked to conceal the extent of his mental decline through scripted messaging, controlled public appearances, and limited access. Staffers controlled Biden’s daily activities, appearances, and workload to prevent the public from seeing his diminishing mental capacity, the report says.
For the most part, Biden’s staff dismissed the possibility that the American people were concerned about his mental faculties. In a similar manner, Biden’s staff attributed his disastrous June 2024 debate performance to a bad cold and minimized Biden’s struggles on that fateful night.
The Oversight Committee investigated the coverup of Biden’s mental capacity with a specific focus on the Biden administration’s autopen usage at the end of his term. According to the committee, Biden officials used presidential authority and initiated executive actions without direct authorization from Biden himself, including using the autopen to sign executive orders without written approval.
The panel’s findings are based on 14 interviews with top Biden aides over the course of several months. High-profile former Biden officials including former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and former White House chiefs of staff Ron Klain and Jeff Zients spoke to the committee for the investigation. Members of Biden’s “politburo” of decision-makers and other prominent spokespeople for the former president also delivered testimony.
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The committee accuses the Biden administration of failing to adequately document its decision-making process and the individuals with custody of Biden’s decision binder. The binder contained decision memos for Biden to sign or initial in order to approve or disapprove executive actions.
There were instances during the Biden administration where executive actions were taken without written authorization or clear evidence of Biden’s approval. Those actions included presidential pardons and grants of clemency. During the final days of Biden’s term, he took clemency actions that were not backed up by a decision memo and prompted concerns from ethics attorneys at the Biden Justice Department. The DOJ attorneys were unsure if Biden knew the criminal histories of the individuals who were set to receive clemency.
National Review previously reported on internal emails showing the White House’s process for deciding on commutations for violent criminals was chaotic and insular. The Biden administration did not consult with the families of the victims of the violent criminals as part of its clemency process.
Another instance the report mentions is the pardons Biden issued in the final hours of his presidency to members of his family. No records exist for the in-person meeting that led to the decision to grant those pardons.
Rather, Zients verbally authorized the use of the autopen after an aide of his transmitted the decision to issue the pardons. Zients did not know who actually applied the autopen and did not confirm with President Biden that he approved the pardons. The aide sent an email on Zients’s behalf expressing approval of the Biden family pardons.
“In light of the former president’s cognitive deterioration and the cover-up from his inner circle, this ‘approval’ process calls into question the validity of all pardons reportedly granted by President Biden throughout his tenure. The Committee deems void all executive actions signed by the autopen without proper, corresponding, contemporaneous, written approval traceable to the president’s own consent,” the report asserts.
Biden’s physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor, and former senior Biden officials Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini, invoked their Fifth Amendment rights instead of testifying for the investigation. The committee report highlights O’Connor’s central role in the Biden cover-up through “grossly misleading” medical assessments and his refusal to conduct a cognitive examination on the sitting president. It also notes that O’Connor’s medical evaluations were influenced by politics.
Zients and former senior Biden official Anita Dunn testified about the role Biden’s political advisers played in his medical evaluations.
Bernal and Tomasini are also described in the report as extremely loyal Biden staffers whose activities warrant further investigation. Comer wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi suggesting she review all the executive actions of the Biden presidency and investigate the three Biden officials who pleaded the Fifth. Comer also asked the Washington, D.C., Board of Medicine to review O’Connor’s actions for any potential malpractice.
“The Biden Autopen Presidency will go down as one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history,” Comer said in a statement.
“Our report reveals how key aides colluded to mislead the public and the extraordinary measures they took to sustain the appearance of presidential authority as Biden’s capacity to function independently diminished,” he added.
Trump already directed the Justice Department to investigate whether any criminal activity took place in the effort to conceal the extent of Biden’s mental decline.
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