If President Donald Trump has his way, Joe Biden’s entire presidency may be wiped away with the stroke of an autopen.

The 47th president and many others have raised the possibility that numerous consequential actions taken during the Biden-Harris administration, including his pardons for his family members, may be null and void. The administration has suggested Biden had no knowledge of some of the legislation and executive orders he allegedly signed into law — but which a new analysis finds was actually signed by a machine known as an autopen, which reproduces the president’s signature, with or without his authorization.

Biden’s lame-duck pardons of then-Rep. Liz Cheney, members of the controversial House January 6 Select Committee, “and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen. In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!” wrote President Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social, early Monday morning. (Emphasis in original.) “The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime.”

Trump also posted a meme on the same account replacing Joe Biden’s presidential portrait with a picture of an autopen.

If upheld in court, the president’s theory could repeal a broad swath of Biden’s presidency, according to a new investigation spearheaded by investigators from a world-renowned think tank.

“We gathered every document we could find with Biden’s signature over the course of his presidency,” announced The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. “All used the same autopen signature except for the announcement that the former President was dropping out of the race last year.”

The project seemed particularly keen to learn “[w]ho is behind this autopen on 12/30/2022 that pardoned six criminals (with the exact same autopen signature) while Joe Biden was vacationing and golfing in the U.S. Virgin Islands,” which, like all other documents, “say they are ‘Signed in the City of Washington.’”

“It is really unprecedented with what we found here,” Kyle Brosnan, chief counsel for the Oversight Project at The Heritage Foundation, told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice Monday. His team combed through 51 presidential documents pardoning or granting clemency to criminals from the Biden presidency and found 32 were signed by autopens. Their analysis determined two different autopens signed each half of those 32. Each of the two autopen’s signatures differed slightly.

As one of his last acts in office, President Biden offered his son, Hunter Biden, “a full and unconditional pardon” for “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part” during a nearly 11-year period coterminous with Hunter’s highly compensated service on the board of the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. Biden bestowed legal absolution on five other family members, including his brother, Jim, and sister-in-law, Sara; his sister, Valerie, and her husband, John T. Owens; and another of the Biden brothers, Frank. The Biden family had a decades-long history of shady business deals which critics said resembled influence-peddling.

The Biden-Harris administration also pardoned Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief author of the COVID-19 pandemic response; Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who admitted to communicating with Chinese miliary officials behind President Trump’s back during the Trump-Pence administration; January 6 committee members; and thousands of people convicted of drug offenses, including a child killer.

“It’s really important to examine this in the context of President Biden’s mental decline during his presidency,” explained Brosnan. “You have a president whose mental facilities are declining significantly throughout his presidency to the point where he doesn’t run for reelection.” Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race following a disastrous June 27 debate, albeit only after being pressured to drop out by numerous legislators, including then-longtime friend Nancy Pelosi.

But does the use of an autopen ipso fact render his pardons null and void? “We need to examine a couple of key questions here: Did the president authorize the autopen signature for each and every clemency warrant that has an autopen signature? Who had access to the autopen? What were the procedures in place there?” asked Brosnan. “Because if those clemency warrants were signed when the president did not authorize them, or did not even have knowledge of who he was pardoning, then you get into really sticky legal territory.”

At a minimum, the use of an autopen on official presidential documents raises thorny constitutional issues, all the more so given President Biden’s diminished capacity at the time. Senior administration officials later revealed they went months without meeting the president in person, as unelected officials handed out orders purportedly issued by him. One former staffer explained others all-but arrogated the power of the presidency to themselves. “I feared no one as much as I feared that [staffer]. To me, [the staffer] basically was the president,” a former White House staffer told the New York Post. “There is no clarity on who actually approved” bills, but they continued to be signed. “No one ever questioned [the staffer]. Period.”

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) has requested the Justice Department review the extent to which others manipulated Joe Biden’s signature of legislation and executive actions over the course of his tenure in office.

“Under the 25th Amendment, his inability to make decisions should have meant a succession of power. Instead, it appears staffers and officers in the Biden administration may have exploited Biden’s incapacity so they could issue orders without an accountable President of sound mind approving them,” wrote Bailey in a March 4 letter to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. “I am demanding the DOJ investigate whether President Biden’s cognitive decline allowed unelected staff to push through radical policy without his knowing approval. If true, these executive orders, pardons, and all other actions are unconstitutional and legally void.”

“There are profound reasons to suspect that Biden’s staff and political allies exploited his mental decline to issue purported presidential orders without his knowing approval,” Bailey wrote to Horowitz.

“Who has been running the country for the last few years?” he asked.

Bailey asked Horowitz “to launch an investigation, or refer my request to another investigative body, to determine which of Biden’s purported orders were knowingly issued by a competent President and which were not.”

Bailey is far from the first figure in Washington to question Biden’s cognitive state during his tenure as officeholder. Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded Biden had broken federal laws on handling classified information, but Hur declined to prosecute him on the grounds that the president appeared to be “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) also recounted a conversation in early 2024 when President Biden insisted he had not signed an executive order bearing his signature, which restricted an oil pipeline. “I didn’t do that,” Johnson recalled the president telling him.

“I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, ‘We are in serious trouble — who is running the country?’” said Johnson. “I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know,” 

The second Trump administration significantly tightened the rules for auto-signing legislation. Trump-47 White House Staff Secretary William Scharf drafted a memo noting, “Our practice around autopen usage is far more restrictive than most previous administrations. We do not use the autopen for documents that exercise the powers of the Presidency. So, for example, we do not use the autopen for executive orders, presidential memoranda, decision memoranda, nominations, appointment orders or commissions, or bills to be signed,” he specified.

President Trump said he tries to sign every document that crosses his desk, including requests for autographs. “If you do letters where people write in, I’ll sign them whenever I can, but when I can’t, I would use an autopen. But to use them for what Biden used them for, is terrible,” he said.

The Oversight Project’s inquest has broadened beyond pardons, commutations, and executive orders to the signature legislation Biden signed during his four years in office. “Our investigation is continuing into other exercises of presidential power, including copies of enrolled bills and enrolled executive orders,” Brosnan told Hice. “We’re requesting copies of enrolled bills from the National Archives.”

The Constitution (Article 1, section 7) specifies, “Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated.” Signing any bill with an autopen raises questions about its validity, although a 2005 memorandum opinion from George W. Bush’s Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said the practice would be legal. The 43rd president notably departed from standard order through his expansive use of signing statements.

The practice of signing bills by autopen appears to have begun under Barack Obama, who used the machine to extend the PATRIOT Act while he traveled through Europe in 2011. “It is apparently the first time in U.S. history this has been done,” reported NPR. At the time, it triggered a constitutional challenge from then-Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.). Weeks later, he and a handful of fellow Republicans asked Obama to again sign the extension by hand “out of an abundance of caution,” because “it is clear that assigning a surrogate the responsibility of signing bills passed by Congress is a debatable issue, and could be challenged in court.” Obama made no reply.

If Brosnan’s investigation holds up, it could erase much of the legislation signed during the last four years — ironically earning Joe Biden a historic role in U.S. presidential history.