Mike Howell was watching his phone this month when he saw a letter from the Missouri Attorney General questioning whether President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had the “psychic ability” to sign pardons and executive orders issued in his last few months.
Howell, executive director of the Surveillance Project, a branch of the Conservative Heritage Foundation, felt the opportunity, he said in an interview. For months he compared Biden's signatures on dozens of official documents, noting that many of them looked the same. Before boarding the flight, Howell made a post he conspired with X.
Biden's critics questioned his fitness appointment, but no evidence has been revealed that he disagreed with any of the actions he has signed.
But by the time Howell landed, his post was word of mouth. Within days, the notion that a vicious, deep state operative secretly ran the country on Biden's behalf, using mechanical gimmicks to achieve a demonic end, and was furious.
Autoopen is a machine that uses a real pen to copy a person's actual signature. For decades, the president and other politicians have used such devices with little public interest. Data on important references from the Media Tracker shows that in the first two months of the year, the term was mentioned in US television, radio and podcasts a total of 49 times.
It was uttered 6,188 times on March 17th alone.
Right-wing talk radio, podcasts and cable news programs now devote hundreds of segments to the arcana of wet signatures and autopen technology. They focus in particular on Biden's signatures on pardons from political allies like California Democrats Adam Schiff and his son Hunter Biden. And they argue that the former president is mentally disabled and does not know the documents he is being asked to support.
President Trump himself has repeatedly lifted the issue over the past week, denounced Biden's use of autopens. He argued without providing evidence that Biden had not granted pardons, and without providing evidence that they had posted to a true society that was “blank, empty, and in no further effect.”
Trump himself admitted to using an autopen from time to time, but he raised the question again at a press conference at the Oval Office on Friday.
Biden has not commented whether he personally signed all the pardons, but senior aide Neela Tanden during his administration posted online this week that he “were automates all the governments.” A Biden spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
There was no federal law banning the use of devices, and 20 years ago a memo from the Department of Justice confirmed that a bill could confirm that the president “instructs him to sign a president's signature.” Previous memos from 1929 stated the pardon saying “they don't have to have a president's signature,” and legal experts pose serious questions about the president's ability to withdraw his pardon.
The rapid shift in speculative and legally unstable hypotheses compiled into topics supported by pro-Trump activists at the highest levels of government demonstrates the extraordinary efficiency of today's right-wing media environment.
“Welton Chang, co-founder and CEO of Pyrra Technologies, a digital threat company that tracks social media trends,” said:
It is not clear where the conspiracy theory took root, but Pirula noticed a lonely post on the 4chan message board in October referring to Autopens and Mr. Biden, and even before he admitted the pardon in question.
By then, Howell's surveillance project, launched in 2022 by the Heritage Foundation, which has a mission to “increase aggressive surveillance in the Biden administration,” has already been deeply ingrained in its research.
Earlier last summer, former Congressman Jason Chaffetz, who is now a visiting fellow at the Surveillance Project, came up with the idea of ​​collecting copies of the presidential documents signed by Biden to see if the signatures matched.
“I doubted that perhaps all of them weren't real,” Chaffetz said in an interview. “This is like we dive in.”
Dozens of staff members began compiling documents from the federal registers and demanding copies of the resolutions and bills from the National Archives from Congress, Howell said. However, after Biden dropped out of the race in late June, the project felt less urgent.
That changed when Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey posted a three-page letter to X on March 5th. Without direct evidence, it suggested that members of the former president's staff had exploited him and pushed forward with enforcement orders and pardons he would not have supported.
Mr. Howell said he didn't know Mr. Bailey and he didn't warn him that the letter was coming. Still, it was so fully woven in the study of signatures he had already done that he couldn't believe in his luck.
“It was eighth on the to-do list,” Howell said. “Then AG Bailey drops his letter and it shoots to the top.”
X's Howell's thread has earned over 3 million views. Within hours, the subject was widely discussed on conservative talk radio.
By the next day, she jumped to popular podcasts such as a podcast hosted by Glenbeck, which has 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube, and from there to Cable News, Fox Business Network host Elizabeth MacDonald asked, “Who controls Biden's autopen, should control Joe Biden's president.”
With the increase in public interest, surveillance projects have been promoted. “We have determined that the most legally vulnerable document is an amnesty,” said Howell, who released an analysis of the signatures in five amnestys last weekend.
These pardons, issued in the last full day of Biden's term and designed to preempt potential prosecutions, have infuriated Trump. A swirling question about Biden's signature caught his attention.
“You don't use an autopen. No. 1, it's disrespectful to the office. No. 2, maybe it's not even invalid. Trump said at a press conference at the Justice Department the day after the surveillance project released its findings on the pardon.
Some critics, including conservative jurist Jonathan Turley, challenged the idea that pardons could be nullified, noting that the president is permitted to use autopensions and that there is no concrete evidence of a conspiracy to circumvent Biden's will. “This dog doesn't hunt,” Tarley wrote in X.
Howell said the only viable way to test the question is in the courts.
“If that happens, it's a rocket ship to the Supreme Court,” Howell said, adding that his work is not finished. This week he published a 29-page legal memo about Autopens. He also pledged to use the Freedom of Information Act to find more documents signed by Biden, and is considering hiring a forensic handwriting expert to review each.
“We're loading cannons for all sorts of things,” he said.
