A Senate Republican charged that former President Joe Biden and top administration officials ‘demolished’ the constitutional guardrails for pardons by using an autopen.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wrote in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, which was first obtained by Fox News Digital, that there are a list of ‘core constitutional requirements’ that must be met for pardons and granting clemency, and that the administration’s usage of an autopen likely ran afoul of those guardrails.
In the waning months of his presidency, the Biden administration commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 inmates and pardoned 39 others in December. A little over a month later, the administration issued roughly 2,500 more commutations — the most ever by a president in a single day.
Cruz, who is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and chair of the Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights, offered to provide Bondi assistance in ongoing investigations into the administration’s alleged abuse of the autopen.
He said that the clemencies were issued ‘based on broad criteria rather than case-by-case evaluations, and at least some were signed using an autopen of then-President Biden’s signature.’
‘These core Constitutional requirements, considerations, and expectations were demolished in the final months of the Biden administration for partisan and personal motives by President Biden, his family, and his top officials,’ Cruz said.
Cruz noted that the presidential pardon authority granted under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution requires a chain of custody of sorts: there has to be an unbroken line from the president to a pardon being granted, he said.
‘Everyone involved in the process — government officials purporting to issue a pardon, the person to whom it is being granted, judicial and law enforcement officials, and most of all the American people — should have absolute confidence a pardon was granted at the president’s explicit direction,’ Cruz said.
But recent reports, and ongoing congressional investigations, have raised doubts over whether Biden explicitly directed the avalanche of pardons toward the end of his presidency.
Cruz’s letter comes on the heels of a report from Axios that unearthed emails that showed Biden officials raised concerns with how the president’s team decided to make certain pardons and the frequent usage of the autopen.
Cruz said that the emails showed that the Biden White House ‘implemented a process that separated the President from officials responsible for signing pardons on his behalf.’
‘They could not know if they were doing so at the President’s direction, either on a case-by-case basis or as a matter of criteria,’ he said.
He argued that the doubts raised by recent reports, and the ongoing investigations by the Justice Department, risked a ‘constitutional crisis in which the other branches and the American people cannot have faith that the President’s Article 2 pardon power was legitimately deployed.’
‘If the integrity of the clemency process was broken by Biden officials, such that the relevant actions were not taken at the President’s direction, the status of the pardons and commutations would at a minimum be cast into doubt, and the officials involved in approving and using the autopens should be held accountable,’ Cruz said.
