The Biden autopen scandal continues to get more interesting with every passing day.
This week, Axios released a report that more or less regurgitated reports conservative outlets have been issuing for months, but since a left-wing site has finally stepped forward, now the claims are being taken seriously.
The situation has now led to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) threatening to nuke all of Biden’s record-setting pardons and commutations.
All told, Biden issued more than 4,000 commutations and pardons, setting a presidential record.
The problem, however, is that it now appears that Biden did not approve these grants of clemency on an individual basis.
From email chains that have been revealed, we know that his chief of staff, Jeffrey Zients, had given the final approval, at the very least, for final commutations that were issued just as Biden was leaving office.
Biden even admitted that he only provided guidelines for who needed to be pardoned, acknowledging that he had not looked over every individual case.
The report from Axios this week finally made the situation a national headline that the mainstream media is now being forced to cover.
The outlet's reported noted that many top DOJ officials were concerned about the pardons, as normal protocols appeared to have been skipped in getting clemency grants approved (for the sake of this article, we are calling all pardons and commutations “pardons”).
One of the more disturbing email chains was a late-night push to get a group of pardons approved, with word of the grants coming down in the middle of the night and a formal announcement emerging in the wee hours of the morning.
The bottom line is that everyone knows that Biden was putting in banker’s hours, so the odds of the former president being present to approve pardons at 3:00 a.m. and making an announcement at 5:00 a.m. seem pretty remote.
Cruz is now on a quest to have these pardons nullified based on the way in which they were approved.
The senator stated that Biden issued the pardons "based on broad criteria rather than case-by-case evaluations, and at least some were signed using an autopen of then-President Biden’s signature.”
He continued, "These core Constitutional requirements, considerations, and expectations were demolished in the final months of the Biden administration for partisan and personal motives by President Biden, his family, and his top officials.”
I have always thought that presidential pardons were a frequently abused power, so I fully support this challenge from Cruz. This is also something I would love for Congress to take a look at and, if possible, revoke as one of president's powers. It has become so politicized and the subject of such misuse that I just don’t think it is something we can continue to allow if we want our justice system to be taken seriously.
