President Trump wrote on social media on Sunday night that he no longer considered valid the pardons his predecessor granted to people whom Mr. Trump sees as political enemies because they were signed using an autopen — a typically uncontroversial method of affixing a presidential signature.
Mr. Trump, who specifically took aim at the pardons granted to members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, offered no evidence for his claim, and there is no power in the Constitution or case law to undo a pardon. But Mr. Trump’s assertion, which embraced a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory about former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was a new escalation of his antidemocratic rhetoric.
Implicit in his post was Mr. Trump’s belief that the nation’s laws should be whatever he decrees them to be. And it was a jolting reminder that his appetite for revenge has not been sated.
“The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on social media on Sunday night. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”
The use of an autopen is not new; it apparently was first used to sign a bill into law at the direction of a president in 2011, when President Barack Obama was traveling in Europe and wanted to sign a piece of legislation that Congress passed extending the Patriot Act another four years.
After he made the post, Mr. Trump was asked on Air Force One if he had ever used an autopen. “We may use it, as an example, to send some young person a letter,” he said, noting the White House gets many letters from children and people who are ill. “But to sign pardons and all of the things he signed with an autopen, is disgraceful.”
Mr. Trump also seemed to briefly back away from the extraordinary idea he had just posted. He was asked: Would other things Mr. Biden signed as president using an autopen also be considered null and void?
“It’s not my decision,” he said. “That would be up to a court. But I would say that they’re null and void, because I’m sure that Biden didn’t have any idea that it was taking place.”
In the final hours of his presidency, Mr. Biden granted a wave of pre-emptive pardons to relatives; all members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on Congress, including Liz Cheney, a former congresswoman and the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney; and some of Mr. Trump’s most high-profile foes, including Gen. Mark A. Milley and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.
Rampant online discussion and theorizing about the Biden administration’s use of autopen, fueled by right-wing pundits, chiefly put forward conspiracy theories that aides to Mr. Biden were abusing it to do all sorts of things under the nose of an out-of-it chief executive. The pinned post on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social profile is a meme depicting a framed picture of an autopen hanging on a wall in the place where a portrait of the 46th president ought to be. (Elon Musk reposted the meme to his 219 million followers, adding a bull’s-eye emoji and a crying laughing emoji.)
The autopen narrative started to fall apart Monday afternoon, when the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was asked during the briefing whether administration lawyers had told Mr. Trump that he had legal authority to undo pardons signed using an autopen.
She said the president was merely “begging the question” of whether Mr. Biden was even aware of the pardons that had been signed — although she was soon reminded that Mr. Biden had spoken publicly about them. She went on to speculate that there may have been some pardons he didn’t know about, but ultimately acknowledged that she had no evidence that was the case.
Devlin Barrett contributed reporting.
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