Rep. James Comer (R-KY) appeared on Fox Business to demand that former President Joe Biden’s pardons made on the final day of his term be nullified.
Comer appeared on Mornings With Maria Monday, demanding that Biden’s last-day pardons be undone, particularly one granted to former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Biden’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“There were never any meetings that Joe Biden had with his staff on these pardons,” Comer said, according to a clip surfaced by journalist Aaron Rupar, dismissing host Maria Bartiromo’s statement that it was merely that the pardons wouldn’t count because they were signed with an autopen rather than by hand.
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“The defense is: There were never any scheduled meetings on his calendar… There was not a single person involved in the pardon process, in the decision making on who authorized the auto-pen, that ever met with Joe Biden and discussed the individual pardon. So, there’s no evidence Joe Biden had any decision making in the pardon process. So, I think that alone is more than enough evidence to declare all the pardons issued by Joe Biden in the last day of his presidency null and void.”
Comer’s comments came after outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified documents related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Gabbard said the documents show a connection between the United States and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, reigniting debunked claims that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak.
The autopen, a device that stores the motions of a person’s signature and can automatically recreate it, has been at the center of a number of right wing conspiracy theories. Though it is a fact that Biden often used an autopen to automate the document-signing process, he is far from the first president to use it, according to NPR. Moreover, there is no evidence that Biden did in fact use an autopen for these particular pardons.
But even if he did, it would not matter. Nothing in the legal code requires a pardon to have a hand-signed signature. The president is granted the power to issue pardons or grant clemency in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. There is no mechanism through which Congress or another president can revoke a completed pardon. A president can revoke a pardon before it has been accepted by the pardonee—as happened in 1869 and again in 2008 under President George W. Bush—but once the pardon has been completed, it is forever. The only person who can go against a presidential pardon is the pardonee themselves if they refuse to accept it.
Not to mention that while the Department of Justice or other officials can make recommendations on whether or not to grant a person clemency, there is no requirement that the president must meet with anyone to discuss a pardon. The president has full discretion on whom to pardon. A pardonee does not have to be convicted or even indicted—for example, President Gerald Ford preemptively pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, from being tried for any of the actions that led to his resignation.
Though he’s called for Biden’s pardons to be revoked in the past, President Donald Trump has also made a number of controversial pardons. Most famously, one of his first acts upon taking office for the second time was to pardon anyone involved with the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. If Biden’s pardons could be revoked, it stands to reason that a future president could revoke many of Trump’s pardons.
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