The autopen pardons

A 2005 Justice Department legal opinion concluded that a president need not personally sign a bill and may direct that his signature be affixed. Obama had one used in 2011 to sign a Patriot Act extension while he was in Europe; Jefferson used a mechanical copier. [1][2][3]

There is no constitutional requirement that a pardon be signed at all, and no mechanism to revoke one. “Pardons are final and irrevocable,” the constitutional scholar Brian Kalt told PBS, and an 1869 federal ruling held that once a pardon is complete “there is no power to revoke it.” Scholars told Reuters the same after Trump’s December 2025 declaration. [3][4]

The House majority’s report quoted an email that aide Neal Po sent on Zients’s behalf for the final pardons: “I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons. Thanks, JZ.” It said that some decisions were authorized orally with no signed decision memo, and “deems void all executive actions signed by the autopen without proper, corresponding, contemporaneous, written approval traceable to the president’s own consent.” A committee cannot void a pardon. [1]

Biden told the New York Times in July 2025, “I made every decision,” explaining that the volume of clemency, nearly 4,000 commutations, made the autopen necessary. Committee Democrats said the testimony showed him making his own decisions. The Justice Department’s inquiry was reported shelved in March 2026 and, a day later, said to be continuing into aides. [2][3][4][5]