The NYT reports on its 10-minute interview with Biden and tells us that “Mr. Biden said that he had orally granted all the pardons and commutations issued at the end of his term, calling President Trump and other Republicans ‘liars’ for claiming his aides had used an autopen to do so without his authorization.”
How does he know he made every decision? We’re not liars if we simply doubt that he had the mental capacity to know what was going on. What sort of decision-making was it? Am I a liar if I presume he did nothing more than rubber-stamp whatever was recommended by the staff? In that light, the autopen is irrelevant. It was “a whole lot of people” who were given clemency, and that’s a reason to spare him the effort of wielding the pen, but it’s also a reason to wonder if he knew much or anything about what he was doing.
