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Former President Joe Biden’s use of an “autopen” to sign last-minute pardons looks like a much “bigger scandal” after the full audio of his scattered interview with special counsel Robert Hur was released Saturday, President Trump said.
“Whoever had control of the ‘AUTOPEN‘ is looking to be a bigger and bigger scandal by the moment,” Trump posted on his Truth Social before launching into a tirade against the “thugs” on the House Select January who all were granted preemptive pardons from prosecution by Biden.
Members including former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) were granted the blanket clemency during his final days in office in what appeared to be autopen-authorized documents, according to a subsequent Heritage Foundation analysis.
On Saturday, Axios released five hours of Biden’s Oct. 8-9 sitdown with Hur, during which he spoke in strained tones and mixed up key information from his personal and political career.
“It’s obviously very important to answer our questions truthfully,” the special counsel said at the start of the interview.
“We hope that you’ll … put forth your best efforts and really try to make your best recollection in response to the questions we ask because I acknowledge that some of the questions we are asking relate to events that happened years ago,” he added.
“I’m a young man, so it’s not a problem,” the then-80-year-old president quipped.
But Biden went on to struggle with dates and names, inaccurately claiming his late son Beau had been “deployed” or was “dying” around 2017, when he departed the vice presidency and took with him batches of classified documents. In fact, the former Delaware attorney general passed from brain cancer in 2015.
“Remember, in this time frame, my son is … uh … would’ve been deployed or is dying and so … it was … and by the way there were still a lot of people at the time, when I got out of the Senate, that were encouraging me to run in this period — except the president,” he told Hur and his co-counsel Marc Krickbaum.
Biden also flubbed the year that Trump was first elected — “November of 2017” — and was unable to call up the name of the National Archives or what a “fax machine” is, transcripts released last year also confirmed.
White House counsels including the president’s personal attorney Bob Bauer interjected to assist him when his memory faltered.
“I have a library, and the library has a — two filing cabinets, and it has built into the walls — when I built that home, built into the walls, a space for a copy machine, for — what do you call it, when they send these —,” he said.
Biden elsewhere veered off into tangents including one about a trip he took to Mongolia as vice president where he got to fire a bow and arrow in 2011, bragging to Hur that he was “not a bad archer” before the special counsel redirected the conversation.
Hur later determined that the president “willfully” retained classified material at his private residences and office in Washington, DC, but opted not to bring charges in part because a jury would likely view Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
The newly released audio shows that Biden gave inconsistent answers about his reasons for keeping the sensitive files and sharing them with a ghostwriter for his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad,” suggesting at one point that he may have kept the documents “just for posterity’s sake.”
The Democratic cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline was “a major part” of other political setbacks he’d suffered, such as the 2020 election loss, before pivoting to attack former FBI Director James Comey, who is being probed for threatening violence against him, Trump wrote in the post.
“Remember, it all began with DIRTY COP James Comey, Obama, a hapless and cognitively impaired Sleepy Joe Biden, and my now very famous ACCUSATION that,’THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!'” the president raged, reaching back to his 2016 run for office.
“Whoever had control of the Autopen is just the beginning. The biggest crime of all is that THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED! I (MAGA!) WON THE ELECTION BY MILLIONS OF VOTES, AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT. GOD BLESS AMERICA, FOR THE FIGHT HAS JUST BEGUN!!!”
It’s unclear how many autopen signatures the Biden White House authorized before he left office, but scores of presidents dating back to at least Harry Truman have used the mechanical device to sign official documents.
Trump’s team has since instituted a “far more restrictive” policy for the autopen, with only two top aides — staff secretary Will Scharf and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles — given the authority to use it “for all matters.”
Ex-Biden White House sources previously suggested to The Post that one of the 46th president’s aides may have liberally used the autopen for several signatures before the end of the term.
English (US)