Top Biden administration officials questioned and criticized the way the former president’s team handled pardons and made use of an autopen in the waning days of his White House term, a report said, citing internal emails.
A person familiar with the clemency process told Axios that after President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter on Dec. 1, 2024, ‘There was a mad dash to find groups of people that he could then pardon — and then they largely didn’t run it by the Justice Department to vet them.’
The news agency reported Saturday that several senior Justice Department officials raised concerns with the White House Counsel’s office regarding the process to pardon individuals.
Three days before Biden left office, the president announced that he was ‘commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of non-violent drug offenses who are serving disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today under current law, policy, and practice.’
‘With this action, I have now issued more individual pardons and commutations than any president in U.S. history,’ Biden said in a statement on Jan. 17.
However, Axios reported that the following day, senior Justice Department ethics attorney Bradley Weinsheimer argued in a memo that describing those who were pardoned as nonviolent was ‘untrue, or at least misleading.’
‘Unfortunately and despite repeated requests and warnings, we were not afforded a reasonable opportunity to vet and provide input on those you were considering,’ Weinsheimer wrote, according to Axios.
The news agency said Weinsheimer mentioned a man who pleaded guilty to murder-related charges.
Weinsheimer described how the Justice Department labeled the man as ‘problematic,’ yet Biden commuted his sentence, Axios reported.
‘I have no idea if the president was aware of these backgrounds when making clemency decisions,’ Weinsheimer reportedly added.
Ed Siskel, the former head of the White House Counsel’s office, and representatives for Biden did not immediately respond Saturday to requests for comment from Fox News Digital.
Senior Biden White House officials also pushed back internally on requests to use the autopen, according to Axios, which cited emails it obtained.
It said Biden White House staff secretary Stef Feldman repeatedly asked for more information and confirmation of Biden’s intentions with the autopen.
‘When did we get [Biden’s] approval of this?’ Feldman reportedly wrote in a Jan. 7 email regarding the use of autopen to sign an executive order.
‘I’m going to need email from… original chain confirming [Biden] signs off on the specific documents when they are ready,’ she was cited by Axios as writing in a Jan. 16 email about using autopen to commute cases linked to crack-cocaine sentences.
The developments come as President Donald Trump has ordered an investigation into Biden’s administration, alleging that top officials used autopen signatures to cover up the former president’s cognitive decline.
‘I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false,’ Biden said in a statement in June.
‘This is nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations,’ he added at the time.
Fox News Digital’s Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.
