High-ranking Biden administration officials privately raised concerns about the former president’s sweeping use of pardons and heavy reliance on an autopen during his final months in office, according to internal emails.
After Biden pardoned his son Hunter on Dec. 1, 2024, the White House scrambled to identify additional recipients for clemency, people familiar with the process told Axios, which reported on Saturday it had obtained the administration emails.
“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,” one source said.
President Donald Trump has pointed to Biden’s pardon process to defend many of his own controversial clemency decisions, including for donor-linked allies and others jailed for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
Biden ultimately issued clemency to 4,245 people, the most in U.S. history, with more than 95% granted in the final 3½ months of his term, according to Pew Research.
That included 2,490 commutations announced on Jan. 17, 2025, three days before Biden left office.
The former president said the commutations were aimed at nonviolent drug offenders, but Justice Department ethics attorney Bradley Weinsheimer, who resigned in protest weeks later, disputed that characterization in a memo, saying some recipients had violent records.
Many of Biden’s actions, including pardons for family members on his last day in office, were executed using the autopen.
Internal records show Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, authorized the device’s use hours before Biden departed the White House, with the instructions sent by an aide on Zients’ behalf.
The House Oversight Committee has scheduled testimony from Zients for Sept. 18 to address Biden’s use of the autopen and the broader clemency process.
Other Emails indicate that staff secretary Stef Feldman pressed for clarity on whether Biden personally approved certain autopen uses, underscoring unease inside the West Wing.
Biden defended the practice in a July interview, saying, “I made every decision” and used the autopen because “we’re talking about a whole lot of people.” Records show, however, that only a handful of signatures were required for mass clemency orders.
Several Justice Department officials voiced frustration over being sidelined.
Pardon attorney Liz Oyer objected to White House instructions that excluded murder victims’ families from input on death row cases. Other DOJ officials flagged troubling cases, including a convicted murderer whose sentence was commuted despite warnings.
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