Trump escalates long-running attack on Biden autopen use and claims he’s ‘cancelling’ actions signed with it

CNN President Donald Trump on Friday continued his effort to delegitimize actions taken during Joe Biden s presidency claiming in a social media post that he is cancelling all executive orders and anything else that was not directly signed by his predecessor Trump s declaration made in a post on Truth Social raises a number of questions Chief among them whether he has the legal authority to rescind the former president s actions on the basis he described Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen which was approximately of them is hereby terminated and of no further force or effect Trump wrote without specifying what falls under that The Autopen is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the President of the United States he added Trump further claimed that Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and warned that if he says he was he will be brought up on charges of perjury The Radical Left Lunatics circling Biden around the beautiful Resolute Desk in the Oval Office took the Presidency away from him I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and if he says he was he will be brought up on charges of perjury Thank you for your attention to this matter Trump wrote in his post Biden has publicly disputed that there was any cover-up by his administration saying he made all decisions as president and calling Republicans who have suggested otherwise liars Trump has long fixated on Biden s use of the autopen In March he leaned into the idea that the former president s use of the tool to sign documents revealed that he wasn t in charge while in the White House and that his actions were null and void At the time conservative executive authority scholar John Yoo suggested to CNN that Trump was just having fun at Biden s expense Trump later ordered an inspection into Biden s use of the autopen and its supposed links to the former president s cognitive decline In the Justice Department s Office of Legal Counsel under Republican President George W Bush conducted an extensive review of the legality of a president using the autopen It located that the President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill to sign it within the meaning of Article I Section Trump has majority often focused his autopen theory on Biden s pardons But there too established legal advice from past administrations undermines the claim A memo from the US solicitor general noted that the Constitution didn t even prescribe a method for issuing pardons A separate congressional probe asserted it remained a serious question as to whether Biden was aware of the substance of various pardons and commutations signed in his name via autopen but it did not cite any direct evidence that anyone other than Biden made the decisions that his staff later put into effect