At this point, you would be hard-pressed to find any reasonably informed American who honestly thinks President Joe Biden wasn’t in a state of serious cognitive decline at the end of his term in office. Yet the New York Times has at least two reporters who are willing to pretend they believe this.
On Sunday, the Times ran a piece by notorious Russia collusion hoaxer Charlie Savage and Tyler Pager about the thousands of clemency decisions recorded with autopen in the final days of the Biden administration. The piece is meant, on the surface, to be a defense of Biden and his administration’s use of the autopen.
But anyone who reads the entire article carefully will immediately see that its real purpose is damage control: The Trump White House, Justice Department, and Congress are all investigating the high-profile clemency decisions that came down in the final days of the Biden presidency, and it sure looks like Biden’s top aides were making decisions on their own, without the president’s knowledge.
Despite the article’s framing — “Biden Says He Made the Clemency Decisions That Were Recorded With Autopen” — there’s no evidence presented in the piece that Biden personally authorized any of the last-minute pardons. Indeed, the article states that “Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons … Rather than ask Biden to keep signing revised versions, his staff waited and then ran the final version through the autopen, which they saw as … routine.”
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