President Autopen claims he approved every autopen pardon (07-14-2025--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content, like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:29] Yes, I did see Elmo's posts on Twitter. First Kanye, now Elmo, really? Like, okay. I'll explain later. I want to start with this story out of the New York Times, which I'm not really sure. Well, okay. I think that this was done as a damage control operation by Biden world.

[00:00:56] They gave the New York Times, this is my complete speculation, but it seems like they gave the New York Times access to some of the emails that got turned over as part of the various investigations into Joe Biden's cognitive decline and whether or not he was actually, you know, of sound mind when he was signing off on all of these pardons and commutations in the final hours of his presidency.

[00:01:28] And so I think it started off as a way to, like, get ahead of the story, damage control, put our spin on things, but I'm not so sure it's actually going to serve that purpose.

[00:01:42] So I've read the New York Times article. I've got the highlights of it. And I think it'll become clear why I am betting, but not really betting because I'm not betting on this, but why I think that this came from the New York, came from Biden world to the New York Times.

[00:02:02] So first off, Biden gave an interview to the New York Times. It was over the phone. It was only like 10 minutes or so. And it's my understanding that this was the first New York Times interview that Joe Biden gave, like, since he became president.

[00:02:18] He never sat for an interview with the Times. Number one. Number two. The archives turned over all of these emails to the congressional committee that's investigating and I think maybe DOJ. And they got tens of thousands of emails. But the New York Times only got about a couple dozen.

[00:02:46] So how would that happen? Right. So they obviously did not get it all from the congressional committee. And if Biden sits for the interview with the Times, to me, it's pretty clear that they gave the New York Times a couple of dozen emails in order to advance this narrative that Joe Biden personally approved of every pardon and commutation

[00:03:11] that was issued in the waning days of his presidency. However, some of the emails don't actually prove that. So that's the slight problem, which. Yeah. Well, all right. We'll get to it here. This is a piece. It's a piece of the New York Times by Charlie Savage and Tyler Pager.

[00:03:32] Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is escalating his battle against Republican claims that he might not have been in control of high profile clemency decisions issued under his name at the end of his first term and more generally that his cognitive state impaired his functioning in office. In an interview with the New York Times, Mr. Biden said he had orally granted all the pardons and commutations issued at the end of his term.

[00:04:02] So he said he spoke it into existence. I approve all of these. Keep that point in mind. He claims in this interview that he orally agreed or granted all the pardons and commutations. And he called Trump and other Republicans liars for claiming that his aides had used an auto pen to do so without his authorization.

[00:04:29] All right. That that paragraph, second paragraph of the piece, I'm going to come back to it because that's the central claim from Biden. Joe Biden said, quote, look, Jack. Which means I made every decision, he says, I made every decision asserting that he had his staff use an auto pen that replicates his signature. He says they only did that because we're talking about a whole lot of people.

[00:04:57] Yeah, there were thousands. There were thousands of pardons and commutations granted. There are parallel investigations run by the Trump White House and the Justice Department and Congress. Republicans in Congress have demanded sworn interviews with former Biden aides, prompting them to hire their own lawyers.

[00:05:19] More about that later. Mr. Biden's former White House doctor who said his medical evaluations showed Joe Biden fit as a fiddle. He invoked the Fifth Amendment. When he was called to answer questions, he refused. His lawyer cited the pending Justice Department inquiry and the risk of being ensnared in ambiguous circumstances. What does that mean? Perjury traps.

[00:05:50] You know, the kind that the Obama and Biden DOJ ran against Republicans. Perjury traps. You get somebody to give you some information. Maybe they don't even realize they're being interviewed as part of some probe like General Mike Flynn.

[00:06:07] And the next thing you know, you're getting slapped with making false statements to FBI agents because you didn't remember something or you said something that was incorrect, but you didn't realize you were being interviewed as part of some sort of a criminal probe. So tens of thousands of Biden's emails were turned over by the National Archives. Turned over as part of the investigations. The Times reviewed several dozen.

[00:06:37] Don't know how many. Several. Several. So like a couple would be two dozen. But do people actually say a couple dozen? I guess maybe. A few dozen. I feel like that would be like three dozen. I think when you're at several dozen, I think you're in the four or five. So maybe they looked at about 60 or so emails. Because if it was more than 100, they would have said more than 100. If it was hundreds, they would have said hundreds.

[00:07:04] So I got to think it's like 60 to 70 or so out of tens of thousands. So what does that tell me? That these emails were curated, right? These emails were curated out of the tens of thousands and they were given to the New York Times in order to direct their coverage. Now, the Times does point out they have not seen the full extent of the email,

[00:07:30] so it is impossible to capture the totality of information they contain or what else they might show about Mr. Biden's involvement in the pardon and clemency decisions. But the Biden White House says it had a process to establish that Mr. Biden had orally made decisions in meetings before the staff secretary, a woman named Stephanie Feldman. She managed the use of the auto pen.

[00:07:59] And that would have covered the clemency records that would have gone through the signing device. Okay? So he says, yeah, let's do it. And then they write up these little blurbs, they call them. But it all starts with Joe Biden giving oral approval and then staff scurries around and issues the pardons. Okay? This is the premise of the narrative that they are advancing. All right.

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[00:09:25] Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. I do have a message from a 704 number. So glad you are back. Well, thank you. I am glad to be back. And let me see here. That's to Vince from the last thing. But then there was another message for. Yes. January 6th was a sweeping pardon, not individually. Correct.

[00:09:54] That is correct. That is correct. And that is what the Biden world people. The Biden world people are making the argument that they are or they did these mass pardons based on like a criteria. That's what Donald Trump did. He said, you know, all J6ers. In fact, that's what Jimmy Carter did when he gave pardons for all of the draft dodgers, like half a million of them. But that's a class of people.

[00:10:24] That's a criteria based pardon system. That's not exactly what happened with Biden, though. OK, so. The New York Times piece talks about how the debate performance June 2024. Everybody realizes what we realized years ago is that Joe Biden is having some cognitive issues. Blank stares, mouth agape, seemingly confused.

[00:10:53] Not able to string together sentences trails off in the middle of words like that stuff was occurring for years. And then The New York Times writes this age related cognitive decline is a spectrum. Oh, so it's like gender. At one end, many older people become more prone to blanking on names or losing their train of thought when speaking at length, but remain able to process information and make reasoned decisions.

[00:11:20] And at the other end of the spectrum, some develop profound dementia. Thank you for that update there. Maybe you guys could have explored where Joe Biden was on that spectrum sometime before, like a minute ago. That might have been helpful. Well, Republicans are positing an extreme version claiming Mr. Biden was incapacitated. They are speculating that his staff conspired to use the auto pen to make presidential decisions in his name.

[00:11:45] Yes, you see, that's why they need to interview the people to find out if they were in fact doing that. Yes, because there is evidence to suggest that that did occur when Joe Biden blanks on orders that he issued and doesn't know that he signed things earlier in his term. Did he just forget at that moment? Or did he actually not know that he signed this thing because he didn't sign it? Maybe that's possible.

[00:12:13] You also have the book Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. And how they describe this, you know, core group of aides and advisors and family members that had, you know, formed this protective bubble around Joe Biden to the point where his own cabinet officials couldn't get meetings with him, couldn't see him. So is it possible that they were running the show?

[00:12:40] Well, Tapper and Thompson said, yeah, they called them the Politburo. At the end of his term, Biden reduced the sentences of nearly 4,000 federal convicts and preemptively pardoned politically prominent people that he considered potential targets of Mr. Trump. Biden said in Thursday's interview that he had his staff use an auto pen for the warrants because he had granted clemency to so many people.

[00:13:05] The auto pen was used in all on 25 pardon and clemency warrants from December through January. Okay, but the warrants had many people listed. Some of the individual warrants included large batches of names because they all fell into a broad category, a same policy category, like reducing the sentences of nonviolent drug offenders who met standards that Biden established.

[00:13:33] See, this is now, now they're giving some detail here about this, the structure, the criteria that Biden orally says, yes, do this. And then you've got the staff filling up the, you know, the kitty or the hopper of all of the names that meet this criteria. But there was a problem.

[00:13:58] It was the Bureau of Prisons, I believe, where they, they kept here. Yeah, here it is. Even this is later on. It's like halfway through this article. Even after Mr. Biden made that decision, which was that he did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people. Rather, after extensive discussion of different possible criteria,

[00:14:23] he signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence. Even after Mr. Biden made that decision, one former aide said, the Bureau of Prisons kept providing additional information about specific inmates, resulting in small changes to the list.

[00:14:44] Rather than ask Mr. Biden to keep signing revised versions, his staff waited and then ran the final version through the auto pen, which they saw as a routine procedure. So what's happening there? He's like, give you the criteria. Joe Biden gives the criteria. And then the staff tells the Bureau of Prisons, find out everybody that meets this criteria. And they draft the warrants. And then the Bureau of Prisons comes back.

[00:15:14] Oh, we found some more. Oh, we're going to make some changes. Oh, we're going to do this. Oh, we're going to do that. And then after the Bureau of Prisons was done, that's when they were like, OK, sign off on all of it. And they thought that was routine. That's a routine procedure. So it never went back to him for final approval. OK, so maybe he's going to say, well, you know, I gave oral approval. I said this is the category I want.

[00:15:41] And so it doesn't matter that they never came back to me for the final approval before the auto pen. OK, so that's that's one issue. And again, this is only based off of 50, 60, 70 emails that The New York Times was given along with their first ever interview of Joe Biden. For 10 minutes over the phone. Where he basically gave them four sentences as sound bites and that's it.

[00:16:10] That's all that's in this piece. This screams to me. Biden world PR damage control. They gave The Times the story. They gave The Times the emails. And then they gave them an interview. In order to try to manage the fallout that is occurring off of this auto pen story. But that's not even the worst one. The worst one is about Fauci's pardon. Here's a great idea.

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[00:17:59] Again, I believe that this is the Biden world people that are doing damage control. He gave a 10-minute interview to the New York Times, which requested it as part of its reporting on the investigations. Mr. Biden said he shielded people with the pardons, the preemptive pardons. Guys like Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, right? Along with members of his family.

[00:18:24] So they would not have to run up large legal bills from politically motivated investigations by the Trump Justice Department. Which is like ultimate projection, right? You're concerned about the weaponization of the Department of Justice against political enemies. Oh, that's interesting. I wonder where Trump would have gotten that idea. Yeah.

[00:18:50] So then there is this on the during the final days of the Biden presidency, October 30th. Emails reviewed by the Times show that Biden's White House counsel, a guy by the name of Ed Siskel, notified senior staff to expect a flood of lobbying for clemency grants at the administration's end.

[00:19:12] Because this is when you do it, when there's no political price to pay for getting people, you know, free and clear of their convictions in a court of law. And so Siskel tells everybody, hey, expect this. And here's the process for an orderly review. The final step, he wrote, quote, the president makes the final decision on the final pardon and or commutation slate. Slate. So if you've got a bunch of names, that's the final step.

[00:19:40] And then over the next three months, Mr. Biden made four major sets of clemency actions that were recorded with the auto pen. The emails reviewed by the Times included discussions about all four batches or tranches. They use the term also. Three of the four batches applied to broad categories of people. He reduced the sentences of inmates sent to home confinement during the pandemic, as well as certain nonviolent drug offenses.

[00:20:09] And he turned the death sentences of 37 of the 40 federal inmates on death row. He turned them into life without parole. 37 out of 40. The fourth set was announced on Biden's last day. They included the preemptive pardons for members of his own family and various people who have drawn Mr. Trump's ire.

[00:20:34] The emails reflect White House activities surrounding each of those tranches, including the dates of the meetings at which White House officials indicate Biden made decisions and the names of the senior aides who were in attendance. They also show that the use of the auto pen was managed by Biden's White House staff secretary, Ms. Feldman.

[00:20:53] She wanted to receive written accounts confirming Biden's oral instructions in the meetings before having it used to produce the warrants that would record the clemency actions. So she's asking, I need something in writing that Biden agreed to this because I guess she's not there. She was not in the room. She did not get the oral consent.

[00:21:24] The aides referred to those written accounts of meetings at which Biden delivered oral decisions as blurbs. OK, so staff is writing these blurbs. You see the problem here, right? What if staff is just writing the blurbs and not actually getting any kind of oral consent from Joe? The accounts were drafted by aides to the senior advisors who had participated in key meetings. Oh, wait, it's even worse. There's another layer there.

[00:21:52] It's not even the people that are in the meetings. It's the staff of those people in the meetings. They're writing the blurbs, giving them the Feldman and then Feldman's doing the auto pen. The assistants who drafted the blurbs were not themselves in the room with Biden. The emails implied that Mr. Siskel and Jeffrey Zients relayed what Biden had said to the assistants who then documented it. So you got these two guys.

[00:22:21] The assistants circulated the drafts back to Siskel and Zients and other meeting participants. And then they would send the final versions to Feldman. And she would sign the auto pen. Biden did not individually approve each name for the big categories, right? The categorical pardons, like all of the, you know, death row people. He said that because that applied to really large groups of people. Rather, after extensive discussion of different possible criteria,

[00:22:51] he signed off on the standards that he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence. Even after he made that decision, though, Bureau of Prisons kept giving him additional information about specific inmates. The list kept changing. I already went over that and they would just auto pen it after it was all revised. Biden completed the list of high profile clemency decisions over two meetings. Then this is the fourth group.

[00:23:18] One meeting January 18th, including Zients and Siskel and another aide, Bruce Reed. And then that was the 18th, January 18th. So two days before he's leaving office, right? The next day, the 19th, there's another meeting. His final night as president. Siskel, Reed and three other aides. Anthony Bernal, that was Jill Biden's chief of staff. Steve Ricchetti and Annie Tomasini.

[00:23:47] These were the Politburo people identified in the book. The emails show that Mr. Biden added the preemptive pardons for his family at the January 19th meeting. Took place at the yellow oval room of the White House residence. Biden kept his aides until nearly 10 percent. 10 p.m. rather. 10 p.m. I don't know why I said 10 p.m. 10 p.m.

[00:24:08] Okay, this is now sounding alarms for me because Joe Biden didn't do anything except fail at debate performances after 9 p.m. But we're to believe he was in this meeting until 10 p.m. To talk through all of the decisions. The emails show that an aide to Siskel sent a draft summary of Biden's decisions at that meeting. So, again, not somebody in the room. Siskel in the room. Siskel has his assistant draft up the blurb.

[00:24:38] Right? Then that blurb gets sent to Zients and Siskel at 10.03 p.m. The assistant forwards it to Reed and Zients asking for their approval and then sent a final version to Feldman copying many meeting participants and aides. That went at 10.28. Three minutes later, Zients hit reply all and said, quote,

[00:25:04] I approve the use of the auto pen for the execution of all of the following pardons. I don't think that you're allowed to do that. You approve that? Wouldn't that have to be Joe Biden? This is. This does not look good to me. You've got people writing up synopses of what was discussed in a meeting that they weren't in.

[00:25:33] Then you've got another layer sending it to the auto pen key holder there. And she's just relying on the blurbs. She's just doing it because you've told her Joe Biden said she should do it. But there isn't any actual proof that he did tell her to do that, that he could consent. And then, of course, there's the question of whether he could consent.

[00:25:57] If he's not in a cognitive state to consent, to understand what he's doing, that's another component. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life. And our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. Started in 1997 in Mint Hill, North Carolina.

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[00:26:54] All told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life, told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you. And they will tell others to come who you are. Visit createavideo.com. So there's a piece over at twitchy.com by Aaron Walker. He says, he lays out a couple of things regarding the legality of this issue. He says, first, only the president can issue a federal pardon.

[00:27:25] That's a duty that he cannot delegate. Secondly, an auto pen can be used to do any act that requires the president's signature, but only if the president consents to his signature being placed on the document. Third, if that consent was not given, then as a matter of constitutional law, no pardon was actually issued. That's going to be the rub.

[00:27:55] So if Trump declares one of Biden's pardons to be null and void for that reason, he isn't revoking the pardon. He's saying none was issued in the first place. And for the record, no president can revoke a pardon once properly issued. Another point. No pardon could issue without Biden's consent. The issue isn't just the use of the auto pen. The issue is consent.

[00:28:21] And we are wondering if he really gave his consent. The line about final approval by Jeffrey Zients, that line, suggests they knew they needed his consent. But did they actually follow that procedure? That's the question. Particularly on the pardons that were done the very last day in literally the ninth or the, well, the, I don't know why they call it the 11th hour.

[00:28:50] I guess it was the ninth hour and the 10th hour of his presidency. He's about to leave. He's got less than, he's got like 15 hours left on his presidency. And they do this whole raft of preemptive pardons. What else? So on Jeffrey Zients, when he hit the reply all, I approve the use of the auto pen. So apparently he says it was not Joe Biden giving final approval as they said originally.

[00:29:19] Apparently it was Zients that was approving this to the staff. He also has to have the legal capacity to consent. Joe Biden does. So if Trump wanted to render the pardon a nullity, they would have to show that when Joe Biden put pen to paper, he lacked the legal capacity to consent due to his cognitive decline. We're not saying that is definitely the case. The author of the piece acknowledges that he does not know.

[00:29:47] Only that this is likely the only way the Trump administration can undermine the Hunter Biden pardon. As for the categorical groups, it's more complicated. Presidents can and do issue categorical pardons. I mentioned Jimmy Carter. He did like half a million for the draft Dodgers. And so Biden doing categorical pardons would have been fine.

[00:30:15] But instead, the Biden administration didn't pardon categories. They pardoned specific people that allegedly met Biden's criteria. So he commutes the sentence for a long list of people. But by the New York Times is reporting here, Biden didn't seem to approve of who was actually on the list. He just said, here's my criteria. They then put a bunch of people on the list.

[00:30:45] That's problematic. Mike Benz, he is the host of, well, he's a former State Department cyber guy, executive director of FFO Freedom. And he does a podcast as well. And he points out that Jeffrey Zients, the guy who signed off and said, I approve the auto pen for this Fauci pardon.

[00:31:13] He was the main social media censorship coordinator in the Biden White House, using the power of the White House to threaten big tech companies if they did not censor U.S. citizens who questioned the Biden administration's COVID policies.

[00:31:31] And Benz goes on to say that Fauci was pardoned by the White House COVID-19 coordinator, who coincidentally, apparently, made tens of millions of dollars off financial bets exploiting federal government health care policies. But I'm sure there's nothing to see here.

[00:31:54] Sean Davis at The Federalist says there's no direct contemporaneous evidence that Biden authorized any of the last minute auto pen pardons. All The New York Times provides is claims from staff that he totally said the auto pen was OK and stuff. Totally fine, everybody. It's all totally fine. All right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast.

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