Joe Biden’s only hand-signed pardon during his final months in office was also his most controversial—granted to his son, Hunter.
The revelation comes amid a sweeping investigation ordered by President Donald Trump into Biden’s extensive use of an autopen to sign a large volume of official documents, DailyMail.com is reporting. Trump claims the administration’s heavy reliance on the signature-replicating device was used to mask Biden’s “serious cognitive decline,” calling it a “dangerous and unprecedented conspiracy.”
Battling an aggressive form of prostate cancer and facing persistent scrutiny over his cognitive health, Joe Biden issued clemency to more than 1,500 individuals in his final weeks in office.
The Biden administration hailed the move as the largest single-day act of clemency in U.S. history. However, documents reviewed by the Department of Justice and White House officials reveal that nearly all of those pardons were executed using an autopen.
The lone exception was Biden’s highly controversial hand-signed pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, granting him immunity from prosecution for any federal crimes committed between January 1, 2014, and December 1, 2024.
For months, Biden had repeatedly pledged not to intervene in his son’s legal troubles. But in December 2024—after Hunter pleaded guilty to felony gun charges and faced additional federal tax violations—Biden abruptly reversed course.
“From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” the then-president claimed at the time, despite the overwhelming evidence of his son’s guilt.
“There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five-and-a-half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough,” Biden said, adding: “I hope Americans will understand why a father – and a president- would come to this decision.”
Trump has seized on the growing controversy, directing Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Counsel David Warrington to launch an investigation into Biden’s use of the autopen.
“It has become increasingly apparent that former President Biden’s aides abused the power of presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority,” he wrote in a memo issued this week.
“This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history. The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts,” he added, per DailyMail.com.
