US President Donald Trump has attacked his predecessor Joe Biden for supposedly using an autopen to , arguing that the use of the pen renders the documents "void".
An autopen mechanically replicates someone's signature.
Trump's attack on auto-signatures ignores that they have been used by previous presidents — and that there is no evidence Biden even used the technology for signing the pardons, which gave immunity to a string of Trump's political opponents.
However, the narrative taps into Trump's longtime theory that Biden was not in charge as president, with a mysterious "deep state" instead pulling the strings.
The eye-catching autopen issue also serves to soak up attention as
An autopen device replicates someone's signature. Source: AAP / Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
Is an autopen legal for signing presidential documents?
The US Justice Department is clear on the legal situation.
In 2005, it said the president does not need to sign a bill by hand and can direct an official "to affix the president's signature to such a bill, for example by autopen".
Such rulings do little to curb Trump, or the Heritage Foundation — the conservative think-tank that has pushed the autopen as an attack line.
"The whole subject of autopen, did (Biden) know what he was doing?" Trump asked reporters.
"Did he authorise it? Or is there somebody in an office, maybe a radical left lunatic, just signing whatever that person wants?
"To sign pardons and all of the things that he signed with an autopen is disgraceful."
Trump's claims of Biden using an autopen are unproven.
Some US media have reported the Heritage Foundation's evidence of auto-signing is based on digitised copies, not on original documents — which Biden was in some cases photographed signing personally.
The autopen process is common across US government and business for routine letters, photographs and promotional material, and has been used for presidential pardons in the past.
"Trump cannot void a prior president's pardons," Frank Bowman, of the University of Missouri's School of Law, who has written about the presidential pardon, told AFP.
"A president does not have to personally sign a pardon to make it valid," he added.
In 2011, The New York Times reported that Barack Obama had become the first president to sign a bill by autopen while in Europe. Paper versions are still sometimes flown to the president for signing.
In his last days in office, Biden, now 82, issued pardons for people targeted by Trump — including Biden's own son Hunter, politicians who investigated Trump, a retired military general, Mark Milley, who had criticised Trump and the country's top COVID-19 expert, Anthony Fauci.
"I am not afraid of Trump's latest midnight rant that has no basis in reality," Bennie Thompson, one politician pardoned by Biden, said in a statement to Axios news.
