The “autopen” saga that dogged Joe Biden’s final months just landed another chapter—and this one reads like a case study in how not to run a presidential clemency sweep. Internal emails now show a West Wing scrambling through the night to attach the president’s mechanical signature to one of the most sweeping clemency actions in U.S. history—while senior aides simultaneously fretted over proof that Biden had actually approved the specifics.
Here’s the timeline that matters. According to the messages, the president orally approved commutations for inmates jailed on crack cocaine offenses on January 11. But the autopen didn’t stamp his name onto three documents listing roughly 2,500 recipients until the morning of January 17. In between, the debate intensified.
On the night of January 16, then–White House Staff Secretary Stef Feldman—who functions as a gatekeeper for the autopen—emailed West Wing lawyers with a straightforward requirement: before authorizing a mechanical signature on a mass-clemency package, she needed written confirmation that the president had signed off on those specific documents. “I’m going to need email…confirming [the President] signs off on the specific documents when they are ready,” she wrote at 9:16 p.m.
Six minutes later, Deputy White House Counsel Tyeesha Dixon forwarded that note to the counsel’s chief of staff with a telling aside about the formal clemency paperwork: “He doesn’t review the warrants.”
BOMBSHELL
New emails obtained by NYP reveal Biden didn’t even review the list of clemency recipients that his autopen signed pic.twitter.com/exAHal0t2C
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 4, 2025
That exchange crystallizes the core issue. The Constitution vests the pardon power exclusively in the president. There’s nothing inherently improper about using an autopen—presidents have long relied on it for routine signings—but the underlying decision must still be the president’s, and there ought to be a clean, documented chain of consent.
What these emails suggest is a process struggling to square two facts: (1) Biden had given a general, oral green light on policy (commutations for crack offenses), and (2) staff were racing to align that general approval with thousands of individual warrants without clear evidence he reviewed—or even was presented with—the exact lists before the autopen fired.
Two additional points elevate the stakes. First, the scale: about 2,500 clemency actions is not a housekeeping memo; it’s an historic act with profound consequences for individuals and communities. Second, the timing: a last-minute, late-night scramble makes already-sensitive questions about presidential awareness and consent more acute, especially given prior concerns—raised publicly by Speaker Mike Johnson—that Biden sometimes signed without full briefings.
Legally, these grants will likely stand; courts have been reluctant to police internal White House procedures around the pardon power so long as the signature is authentic and the president’s authority is invoked. Politically and institutionally, however, the emails are damaging. They paint a picture of a staff-driven operation retrofitting documentation to match the president’s broad intent, rather than a president-led process producing a defensible record on the front end.
