Trump’s Investigation Into Joe Biden’s Autopen Use Is Incredibly Stupid | EUROtoday

President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered the Department of Justice and White House counsel to launch an investigation into whether or not actions taken by former President Joe Biden are invalid, primarily based on unfounded accusations that his aides made selections for him.

Aside from the truth that the president straight ordering an investigation into his former political opponent would in all probability have been an impeachable offense till just a few months in the past, this investigation is, for probably the most half, meritless. It doesn’t allege any legal guidelines have been damaged nor any constitutional provisions. It is what it seems like: a fishing expedition designed to precise revenge on Trump’s opponents and feed destructive tales about Democrats to the press.

The presidential memorandum Trump issued on Wednesday claims that “former President Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen [automatic signature] to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority.”

“This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history,” the memorandum states. “The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.”

It goes on to direct Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Counsel David Warrington to research “whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President” and “the circumstances surrounding Biden’s supposed execution of numerous executive actions during his final years in office,” together with govt orders, actions, proclamations, pardons and clemency grants.

The latter investigation into Biden’s govt actions, tasked to Warrington, seeks to find out what number of actions have been signed by an autopen and “who directed that the President’s signature be affixed.” This is aimed toward making the argument that Biden’s eleventh-hour pardons for Jan. 6 committee members and their members of the family, whom Trump desires to research; clemency grants for federal demise row inmates, whom Trump desires to execute; and different presidential actions are unconstitutional and void. Trump has already acknowledged these pardons and clemency grants are “void, vacant, and of no further effect,” on social media, regardless of the very fact he has no authority to declare them as such.

The premise of this investigation is essentially unfounded. While it has been extensively reported that Biden suffered from age-related decline and that his most internal circle tried, poorly, to cover this from these contained in the White House and the general public, there is no such thing as a current proof to counsel that Biden’s aides “abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority.”

This conspiracy emerged from the same old right-wing swamps with the everyday misunderstanding of paperwork posted on-line. A speculative name for an investigation by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey was picked up by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, which had already been compiling govt department paperwork to see if Biden’s signature was an identical in every one. The conservative group examined signatures for Biden’s pardons and posted on-line that the entire signatures regarded precisely the identical — as if a machine signed them.

There are not less than two issues right here. First, the Oversight Project largely relied on pardon paperwork posted to the Federal Register’s on-line web site. At the start of each president’s time period, the president supplies a single digital copy of their signature to the National Archives, which publishes the Federal Register, that’s then affixed to all digital paperwork bearing the president’s signature. So, it’s no shock that the entire pardons have an identical signatures as a result of all paperwork posted to the Federal Register have the identical signature for each president within the digital period.

The second downside is much less embarrassing for these claiming some sort of foul play right here, however extra consequential. That is that the Constitution doesn’t state that the president should signal pardons or clemency grants or, actually, something aside from payments handed by Congress.

“[H]e shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment,” the Constitution states on pardons.

For comparability, the Constitution does require the president to signal payments handed by Congress for them to turn into legislation. “If he approve he shall sign it,” the Constitution states.

But neither Trump nor right-wing teams and media are speaking about payments, though that argument would doubtless be irrelevant in any case. (More on that later.) Trump’s memorandum focuses on “clemency grants, Executive Orders, Presidential memoranda, or other Presidential policy decisions.” It additionally mentions that “the White House issued over 1,200 Presidential documents [and] appointed 235 judges to the Federal bench.” There is not any constitutional requirement {that a} president’s signature be affixed to any of those actions, not to mention that that signature be drafted by the president’s personal hand.

For many years, presidents have used autopens, the primary of which was patented within the U.S. in 1803, to signal all method of paperwork. A 1965 e-book examined John F. Kennedy’s use of the autopen and Lyndon Johnson confirmed the White House’s autopen off on the duvet of The National Enquirer, acknowledging its use publicly for the primary time. At the top of his time period in workplace, President Barack Obama used the autopen to signal pardons whereas he vacationed in Hawaii.

This is all completely authorized and constitutional, based on a 1929 opinion by the solicitor common reported on by USA Today in 2017.

“Nobody but the president can exercise the power, but the power having been exercised the manner of making a record and evidence thereof is a mere detail which he can prescribe in accordance with what he deems to be the practical necessities and proprieties of the situation,” that 1929 opinion states.

As for the one line within the Constitution that directs the president to signal one thing — payments handed by Congress — the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a authorized opinion in 2005written by Howard Nielsen (whom Trump appointed to a district courtroom judgeship), that discovered it’s constitutional for a president to make use of an autopen to signal laws, whether or not he was current for the signing or not, as long as he directed it to be signed. Obama grew to become the primary president to signal laws with an autopen in 2011.

This opinion accommodates copious historic proof for using autopen, or, because it was referred to up to now, “facsimile signature,” by presidents.

In 1969, an Office of Legal Counsel opinion written by William Rehnquist, who would later be appointed Chief Justice of the United States, “advised that the Secretary of State could sign extradition warrants for the President pursuant to ‘a letter from the President to the Secretary requesting him to affix a facsimile of the President’s signature, or to sign in his behalf, or both.’”

All that this required was “provision for notification of and approval by the President prior to the signing,” based on Rehnquist’s opinion.

“The question of whether the President should manually sign his name to a document is primarily one of propriety rather than of law, and it is within the President’s discretion to determine which documents he wishes to personally sign and those with respect to which he wishes to delegate the signing to someone else in his behalf or have his own signature written or affixed by means other than his own hand,” the Rehnquist opinion states.

The solely factor that’s required is that the president be the one to order a doc or invoice to be signed. And Biden has repeatedly endorsed and defended the entire actions he took and signed throughout his presidency.

“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false,” Biden stated in a press release in response to Trump’s investigation.

The lack of any authorized or constitutional challenge right here and the origins of the accusations towards Biden and his aides as rooted in a half-baked, evidence-free conspiracy inform us all we have to know. This is, like so many actions taken within the second Trump administration, a pretext to launch investigations into Trump’s political foes as a way to produce rage bait content material for the conservative media machine and punish these Trump promised to get revenge on.

There is not any legislation right here, simply easy vengeance.