Donald Trump has announced that every pardon, commutation and official document signed by Joe Biden using an autopen is now “null, void, and of no further force or effect”.
But constitutional scholars say the declaration has the same legal weight as a Truth Social rant: none.
On Tuesday night, Trump posted that “any and all” Biden-era documents bearing an autopen signature were to be considered terminated, and warned recipients of clemency that those acts “have been fully and completely terminated”.
The threat, however, collapses under even minimal legal scrutiny. Biden issued 4,245 clemency actions during his four years, most of them commutations, and a smaller number of class-wide pardons for offences like outdated military bans on gay sex or low-level marijuana charges.
Trump’s order did not specify which actions were supposedly invalid because, legally, he can’t invalidate any of them.
That mirrors long-standing precedent: an 1869 ruling found that once a pardon is delivered, it cannot be undone, by any president, for any reason. The US Constitution also doesn’t require presidential signatures to be written by hand.
PolitiFact found no mechanism whatsoever that would allow Trump to retroactively cancel pardons, whether signed with ink, autopen, or magic marker.
Why Trump is pushing this
Trump has spent months claiming Biden relied on the autopen because of “frailty”, and has obsessively pushed the idea that clemency grants to political opponents, including legislators who investigated the January 6 riot, are illegitimate.
In March, Trump insisted that Biden’s pardons for figures like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT” because of the autopen signature. There is no evidence Biden used the device for those pardons, nor does the method of signature matter.
Not the first autopen president
Biden is far from the only US leader to use mechanical signatures. Thomas Jefferson used a dual-pen polygraph system in the early 1800s; John F Kennedy used a modern autopen; Barack Obama used one while travelling.
Legal memos from 1929 and 2005 affirmed a president is not required to sign anything by hand.
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