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Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen appeared on Fox News’ “Saturday in America” with host Kayleigh McEnany this weekend, where the two discussed a September report from Axios alleging that top Biden administration officials questioned and criticized the way the former president’s team handled pardons and made use of an autopen in the waning days of his White House term.
The Sept. 6 report has resurfaced after President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he will be terminating all documents allegedly signed by former President Joe Biden via autopen.
While McEnany acknowledged that autopen use is “par for the course” in the White House and that “every president does it,” she argued that the Biden administration’s use of the tool was unusual, pointing to the Axios report as evidence.
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McEnany, who formerly served as press secretary during Trump’s first administration, noted that the report claimed the staff secretary responsible for managing Biden’s “paper flow” repeatedly requested additional details to confirm the president’s intentions with the autopen.
“It wasn’t ordinary for me to question whether Trump approved something or not,” she added before asking Thiessen if he had the same experience while serving as President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter.
Thiessen pointed out that there was a ruling by the Office of Legal Counsel which deemed the use of autopen to be legal as long as the president intended to use it, and shared a story that revealed the great lengths Bush went to in order to avoid using the tool.
“Bush didn’t want to have any doubts about things. So I remember once there was a continuing resolution to keep the government open, and he was at the APEC summit out in Asia, and they actually took an aide and flew the bill out to Asia so that he could physically sign the bill,” he recalled. “So, you know, that’s how seriously [Bush] took this.”
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The former Bush staffer argued that the problem for Biden is that “everybody now knows he was non compos mentis” — meaning not of sound mind — and that there were “people making decisions for him all the time.”
“The staff secretary clearly had concerns about this and was aware of it and wasn’t sure that Biden was actually issuing these orders,” he continued. “And so, you know, the pardon is a power of the president himself. And to have pardons signed by autopen when the people running the autopen weren’t even sure the president had agreed to pardon somebody, that’s pretty bad stuff.”
Closing out the segment, McEnany added that the Department of Justice (DOJ) also questioned the clemency process under the Biden administration, which set a presidential record for the largest number of pardons and commutations granted to individuals.
A person familiar with the clemency process told Axios that after Biden pardoned his son Hunter on Dec. 1, 2024, “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.”
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In September, the outlet reported that several senior Justice Department officials raised concerns with the White House counsel’s office regarding the process to pardon individuals.
Additionally, senior Biden White House officials pushed back internally on requests to use the autopen, according to Axios, which cited emails it obtained.
It said Biden White House staff secretary Stef Feldman repeatedly asked for more information and confirmation of Biden’s intentions with the autopen.
“When did we get [Biden’s] approval of this?” Feldman reportedly wrote in a Jan. 7 email regarding the use of autopen to sign an executive order.
“I’m going to need email from … original chain confirming [Biden] signs off on the specific documents when they are ready,” she was cited by Axios as writing in a Jan. 16 email about using autopen to commute sentences linked to crack cocaine cases.
Fox News’ Greg Norman contributed to this report.
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