The Department of Justice has not closed its investigation into former President Joe Biden's use of the autopen, a senior DOJ official confirmed Thursday, pushing back on reports that the case had gone cold. But the official acknowledged a blunt reality: building a prosecutable case is "tough." The concession lands somewhere between reassurance and frustration.
Federal investigators have been scrutinizing Biden's use of the mechanical signing device, particularly in the final months of his administration, when it was employed for sweeping pardons and commutations. The probe bumps up against executive privilege issues and what the DOJ official described as "one of the president's broadest constitutional authorities: the pardon power."
In other words, the investigation is alive. Whether it can produce consequences is another question entirely.
The assurances that the investigation continues came after a New York Times report indicated the case had gone cold. DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro responded on X with a carefully drawn line:
"We cannot comment on ongoing investigations."
That phrasing does real work. "Ongoing" is not "dormant." It is not "concluded." Pirro chose a word that contradicts the Times's framing without offering anything the DOJ isn't ready to share.
The senior DOJ official went further, confirming that "there are statutes that apply in this case," though none were named publicly. The official also noted the inherent difficulty of prosecuting conduct related to the pardon power, which has yet to be curtailed through an act of Congress or revoked by a court decision. The 2024 Supreme Court immunity ruling adds another layer: prosecution almost certainly would not implicate Biden himself.
That leaves the people around him.
The House Oversight Committee's investigation into the autopen raised questions that remain unanswered. According to the New York Post, when ex-White House chief of staff Jeff Zients was pressed on who controlled the device, he was unable to name the aide or official in charge of it. His explanation was vague at best:
"There were good processes in place."
He also acknowledged that "[t]here were verbal authorizations of the president's decision that would occur on occasion." For an instrument that carries the legal weight of a presidential signature, "verbal authorizations" and unnamed custodians paint a picture of a White House operating on trust and proximity rather than documented authority.
Zients himself personally approved 11th-hour pardons for Biden family members on January 19, 2025, Biden's final day in office. The Oversight Committee's final report noted that "even if this authority could be delegated, which it cannot, it would have to be expressly delegated by President Biden himself."
Three other figures from Biden's inner circle fared worse under scrutiny:
The House investigation alleged all three facilitated a cover-up. All three took the Fifth Amendment when brought in for questioning.
Three senior White House officials, asked to explain what they knew about the cognitive fitness of the President of the United States and who was wielding his signature, invoked their right against self-incrimination. That is not the behavior of people with nothing to hide.
The autopen story has never existed in isolation. It sits at the center of a broader question the country spent years being told not to ask: Was Joe Biden cognitively capable of executing the duties of his office?
The House Oversight Committee's report offered a devastating observation about the aides who surrounded him:
"It is unclear whether these Biden aides were attempting to be deceptively euphemistic about President Biden's cognitive decline, or whether they had so deceived themselves that they actually believed there to be a meaningful distinction that the American people were simply worried that President Biden was old, not that he was in cognitive decline."
That framing captures something important. The defense was never "he's sharp." The defense was always "how dare you ask?" Reporters who raised the question were dismissed. Voters who noticed were patronized. And all the while, a mechanical device was signing pardons, commutations, and executive orders on behalf of a president whose own staff couldn't explain the chain of authorization.
Biden issued dozens of clemencies for nonviolent crimes and offenders confined in homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. He approved mass sentence commutations for nearly 2,500 inmates convicted of crack cocaine crimes. These are consequential acts of executive power. The American public deserves to know whether the man whose name appeared on them actually directed each one.
Biden himself addressed the matter in a statement last June:
"Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn't is ridiculous and false."
The statement is emphatic. It is also unfalsifiable by design, issued months after leaving office, with no documentation offered to support it, and three of his closest aides refusing to answer questions under oath.
The DOJ's challenge is structural. The pardon power is nearly absolute. Executive privilege clouds the evidentiary landscape. The Supreme Court's immunity ruling shields the former president personally. And the people who might know what actually happened inside the West Wing are exercising their constitutional right to silence.
None of that means the investigation is pointless. It means the accountability, if it comes, will land on the staffers, not the principal. The people who controlled access, who managed the device, who decided when "verbal authorization" was sufficient for acts that reshape the federal prison population.
The broader lesson is one the political class should not be allowed to forget. For years, a sitting president's fitness was treated as a partisan talking point rather than a legitimate governance concern. The media enforced that consensus. The White House staff maintained it. And somewhere in that arrangement, an autopen became a stand-in for presidential authority that may not have been there to delegate.
The investigation presses on. The proof remains elusive. But the questions it forces into the open are not going away, no matter how many aides plead the Fifth.
