Once again, the Fake News Media ignored a major story. @GOPoversight released a bombshell report exposing the Biden Autopen Presidency.
— Rep. James Comer (@RepJamesComer) November 4, 2025
ABC, CBS, and NBC gave it zero airtime. PBS dismissed it. Not one reported our findings or the testimony from senior Biden aides. pic.twitter.com/5Cdokrhnnk
Trump (of course) himself has posted on Truth Social that all of the pardons issued by President Joe Biden "should be declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT." Dunking on both:
O'DONNELL: Why did you pardon Changpeng Zhao?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 3, 2025
TRUMP: Are you ready? I don't know who he is
O'DONNELL: His crypto exchange Binance helped facilitate a $2b purchase of World Liberty Financial's stablecoin. And they you pardoned him.
TRUMP: Here's the thing -- I know nothing… pic.twitter.com/rJFXsJ2VvF
The Sergeant Schultz routine is fooling very few. In a memorandum issued July 7, 2005, the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice concluded
The President need not personally perform the physical act
of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order
for the bill to become law. Rather, the President may sign a bill within the
meaning of Article I, Section 7 by directing a subordinate to affix the
President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.
This guidance appears to be almost unavoidable, given that
according to the U.S. Constitution, the President has no
such authority to overturn his predecessor’s pardons, especially not based on
the type of signature, legal experts say. “The Constitution doesn't even
require that the pardon be written, so the idea that the signature is by
autopen rather than by handwritten signature seems not relevant to the
constitutionality because Article II just says that the President has the power
to pardon,” says Bernadette Meyler, a Stanford Law School professor and constitutional
law expert.
Autopen is an electronic signature that allows individuals to sign a document without physically being there. The signature mimics a handwritten signature but is done by a computer. a vast number of statutes and other documents have been signed by autopen, experts say. For instance, former President Barack Obama signed a national security measure via autopen while he was in France. Meyler says that if presidential pardons were to be invalidated because of an autopen signature, that could bring into question other policies that were signed by such.
So it is legal and common, used even by Donald Trump. Perhaps the President has raised a stink about this because he enjoys any chance to portray his immediate predecessor as a doddering, old fool. Or maybe it was to divert attention from his corrupt and dangerous action of late October in which he
pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had previously pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering while heading the cryptocurrency exchange, the White House said Thursday.
The pardon of Zhao, widely known as CZ, came two months after The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family’s own crypto venture, which has generated about $4.5 billion since the 2024 election, has been helped by “a partnership with an under-the-radar trading platform quietly administered by Binance"...
NBC News, citing a public disclosure filing from Monday, reported that Binance in September had retained the services of the lobbyist Charles McDowell, who is a friend of the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
McDowell’s lobbying firm, Checkmate Government Relations, disclosed that it was paid $450,000 for the prior month’s work, which included lobbying the White House and Treasury Department for “executive relief” and “financial services policy issues relating to digital assets and cryptocurrency.”
The clemency grant for Zhao came nearly a week after Trump commuted the 87-month prison sentence of former New York Rep. George Santos, who had pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
Hours after the law and order President pardoned this thoroughly reprehensible, felonious Zhao, Trump was asked why he had issued the pardon and replied "I don't know he was recommended by a lot of people. A lot of people say that he wasn't guilty of anything. And so I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people."
Ten days later, Donald was asked by 60 Minutes correspondent Norah O'Donnell why he had pardoned Zhao and replied "I don't know who he is" and "here's the thing. I know nothing."
It is tempting to quip that Trump was completely truthful when he remarked "I know nothing." because he's stupid or suffering from dementia. However, he knows a lot. He knew that he was pardoning Changpeng Zhao because the latter had enriched the Trump family fortune. He knew that lying on 60 Minutes at an AR-15 clip would discourage anyone in the media from honing in on one or two of his most dangerous lies. And he knew that the media would not want to emphasize his dishonesty, nor question his health or mental stability.
He understood all those things for the same reason that House Oversight Committee chairman Comer could make up a scandal out of whole cloth without pointing out that he, like the emperor, has no clothes. James Comer is not fair game because he is a Republican and much of the media believes that it's O.K. if you're a Republican because it's just too dangerous to stand up to Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is, well, Donald Trump, and is too dangerous to analyze as it did with President Biden. The slide toward authoritarianism rolls on.
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