Biden Justice Department Officials' 'Scathing" Criticism of Pardon Process

Can an aide to the Chief of Staff order pardons just hours before the end of a president's term?

If Joe Biden is "in charge," the answer appears to be yes. 

Can an autopen be used to pardon people? Not until Joe Biden becomes president. Prior to that, the Justice Department held that the president himself must sign the order directly. 

SCOOP: High-ranking Biden administration officials repeatedly questioned and criticized how the president's team decided on controversial pardons and allowed the frequent use of an autopen late in his term, internal emails obtained by @AlexThomp show. https://t.co/cYnwNCl7VG

— Axios (@axios) September 6, 2025

If Axios is to be believed, not all was sweetness and light when it came to the process by which the Biden administration gave blanket "get out of jail free" cards to the largest number of people in American history. 

High-ranking Biden administration officials repeatedly questioned and criticized how the president's team decided on controversial pardons and allowed the frequent use of an autopen to sign measures late in his term, internal emails obtained by Axios show.

Why it matters: The messages are the latest signs of the chaos surrounding the 82-year-old former president during the final weeks of his administration, in two areas that are now being investigated by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee.

• President Trump has cited Biden's process in issuing pardons to try to justify many of his own controversial pardons or commutations on behalf of donor-connected supporters and others who were imprisoned for trying to overturn the 2020 election.

How it happened: After the political backlash to President Biden pardoning his son Hunter last Dec. 1, the White House began pushing to find more people to grant clemency to, according to people familiar with the internal dynamics.

• "There was a mad dash to find groups of people that he could then pardon — and then they largely didn't run it by the Justice Department to vet them," a person familiar with the process told Axios.
• Biden granted clemency to more people than any president in U.S. history — 4,245 people. More than 95% of those actions occurred in the final 3½ months of his presidency, according to Pew Research.
• Many of those actions, including pardoning other members of his family on his last day in office, were signed using an autopen — a computerized version of the president's signature that didn't require him to physically sign the document.

What a surprise! Who could have guessed that a senile president's administration would go off the rails and that lower-level aids would be abusing the process to achieve their own goals? 

Not me! I would have expected everything to go smoothly and by the book. After all, the Biden people were all about norms, right?

An email from Biden's chief of staff, Jeff Zients, at 10:31pm the night of Jan. 19 — less than 14 hours before Biden was to leave office — confirmed the use of the presidential autopen for those pardons.

• "I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all the following pardons. Thanks, JZ," the email from Zients' account said.

The order came from Zients' email address, but he didn't personally send it.

• Zients' aide Rosa Po, who had access to Zients' email account, wrote and sent the authorization of the president's autopen to senior White House officials on Zients' behalf.
• "He spoke to Rosa at the time, and he authorized her to send that email, which she sometimes did, but only with his permission," according to a person close to Zients.
• Zients, Po and Hertz didn't respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Biden declined to comment.

Several senior Justice Department officials raised objections about the clemency process with the White House Counsel's office, which was led by Ed Siskel. He helped steer the clemency process in the administration's final months and did not respond to a request for comment.

Joe Biden has been one of the most venal and corrupt politicians in America for decades, and as his mental capacities slipped, others within his administration used the opportunity to pursue their own agenda. This was always the plan, of course, and exactly why the Democrats lined up behind Biden in the first place. 

The abuse of the pardon process is the tip of the iceberg. Where the rubber really hit the road was in the distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act. Money was being thrown out the door before Harris' loss, but the process accelerated once it became clear that the scam would not last forever. 

Ask Stacey Abrams about the billions assigned to her. Or any of the other recipients of grants that were intended to sustain their political activities and lavish lifestyles for decades. 

The next day, senior Justice Department ethics attorney Bradley Weinsheimer penned a scathing memo stating that calling the clemency recipients nonviolent was "untrue, or at least misleading."

• Weinsheimer continued: "Unfortunately and despite repeated requests and warnings, we were not afforded a reasonable opportunity to vet and provide input on those you were considering."
• He proceeded to list some of those with violent crime records to whom Biden had given clemency — including a man who had pleaded guilty to charges related to murder after killing a woman and her 2-year-old daughter, after the mother threatened to reveal his drug-dealing business to law enforcement.
• Weinsheimer said the DOJ had marked the man as "problematic," but Biden commuted his sentence anyway. "I have no idea if the president was aware of these backgrounds when making clemency decisions," Weinsheimer wrote.

The Biden administration was the equivalent of a gold rush, and administration figures were mining the federal government for their riches. 

Call it strip mining the taxpayers. 

• Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.

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