Well, who would have guessed that the Biden administration was mostly run by behind-the-scenes staffers making decisions for an unaware president? Besides, well, literally everyone.
That's the conclusion of a new report from The New York Times into the use of autopen from Biden and his aides and employees in making pardon and clemency decisions at the end of his term. "I made every decision," he claimed, denying wrongdoing by telling the Times that he used autopen because "we’re talking about a whole lot of people."
Per the report, "tens of thousands" of emails from the Biden White House have been given to the Trump administration and Justice Department by the National Archives. Those emails include details on the autopen usage, and potentially, how involved Biden actually was in making these decisions.
Biden White House staffers, naturally, defended their actions by saying they had a process in place to ensure that Biden verbally signed off on pardons before they were signed. But how can they be trusted, after their conduct, Biden's obvious mental and cognitive decline, and the consistent pattern of posthoc reporting that Biden was not able to keep up with the demands of his office?
One of the more revealing admissions concerned none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose repeated lies and misleading statements had come under increasing scrutiny in the post-pandemic period.
According to the emails reviewed by the Times, several pre-emptive pardons received final approval from Biden's staffers. Including Gen. Mark Milley, staff and members of the House committee that investigated the events of January 6th at the Capitol, and none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci.
"The same president who lied through his teeth to the American people for four years about everything from his health to the state of the economy should not be trusted again," White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Fox News when reached for comment about the autopen signatures. "The Biden administration conducted the most egregious cover-up scheme in American politics… The truth will come out about who was, in fact, running the country sooner or later, just as the truth is emerging about the state of Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical health."
The Times, in an effort to defend their party and their president, put it this way: "Age-related cognitive decline is a spectrum." Sure, guys. There's no doubt that's how they'd describe it if it were Trump or another Republican politician.
Incredibly, many assistants who wrote "blurbs" that supposedly summarized in-person staff meetings with the aging Biden were not actually in the room with him.
"The assistants who drafted the blurbs were not themselves in the room with Mr. Biden, according to the lists of meeting participants," the Times story says. "The emails imply that Mr. Siskel and Mr. (former chief of staff Jeff) Zients relayed what Mr. Biden had said to the assistants, who then documented it."
So Siskel, Zients and others in the meetings could have told those assistants that Biden said whatever they wanted him to say, and those assistants would have drafted the letters based on that. Then sent those drafts back to Siskel and Zients for approval, and Biden's secretary for autopen signature. A circular set of approvals that the president never even saw.
And Zients was essentially acting president anyway, as the Times revealed when covering an email he sent. In response to a request to approve pardons, Zients wrote "I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons."
The party of protecting democracy in action; a chief of staff nobody's ever heard of signing off on life-changing pardons for a president who frequently couldn't finish a coherent sentence.
When there were changes to bulk pardon lists, his staff would simply accept the word of outside groups making changes or alterations, signing off by their own authority instead of showing Biden.
"Rather than ask Mr. Biden to keep signing revised versions," the story says, "his staff waited and then ran the final version through the autopen, which they saw as a routine procedure."
It was "routine" for them to go around the president and make decisions themselves, based on the word or claims of outsiders. It was "routine" because Biden was almost certainly incapable of making such decisions or dealing with changes and adjustments and issuing new approvals. Unbelievable.
And that's what likely happened with Fauci; Zients, who was the administration's "coronavirus response coordinator" prior to becoming chief of staff, worked closely with Fauci to impose authoritarian mandates that harmed millions while accomplishing nothing of value. As such, he knew that the new administration would look closely into the damage they caused with masking toddlers, COVID vaccine mandates, and refusing to allow unvaccinated travelers to enter the country legally. While, of course, turning a blind eye to the rush of illegal immigration across the Southern border.
So Zients likely recommended Fauci receive a preemptive pardon, then approved the pardon by use of autopen. Maybe he discussed it with Biden, maybe not. After all, it was "routine" to use autopen to make decisions that should have been made by the president himself. And Fauci gets away with it, because he received protection from the administration he ideologically aligned with. It's yet another disgrace, another embarrassment. Allowing one of the chief architects of the COVID disaster to avoid accountability through autopen.
Unacceptable.
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