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Ed Martin, who was recently appointed to the Department of Justice as Pardon Attorney, revealed to staff on Monday that he has been directed to investigate the clemency issued by former President Joe Biden in the final weeks and hours of his presidency.
Martin wrote in an email viewed by Reuters that the investigation centers around whether Biden "was competent and whether others were taking advantage of him through use of AutoPen or other means." The email said that the preemptive pardons issued by Biden to several family members, as well as the clemency granted to 37 inmates on death row, were the focus of his investigation.
On December 1, Biden issued a pardon for his son, Hunter, who had been scheduled to be sentenced for federal firearm charges less than two weeks later. In the last hours of Biden’s presidency on Inauguration Day, Biden issued pardons for brother James Biden and his wife Sara Jones Biden, sister Valerie Biden Owens and husband John T. Owens, and brother Francis W Biden.
Biden also pardoned a number of prominent figures in his last hours in office, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, retired General Mark Milley, former Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and others.
In March, Trump declared that many of the pardons Biden gave on his last day in office "are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen. In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!"
The usage of the autopen under the Biden administration has come under fire in recent months, with Trump saying in late May, "Joe Biden was not for Open Borders, he never talked about Open Borders, where criminals of all kinds, shapes, and sizes, can flow into our Country at will. It wasn’t his idea to Open the Border, and almost destroy our Country, and cost us Hundreds of Billions of Dollars to get criminals out of our Country, and go through the process we are going through now. It was the people that knew he was cognitively impaired, and that took over the Autopen."
House Oversight Committee James Comer has said that the House GOP will interview staffers who had control of the autopen in the last months of Biden’s presidency. "We think we've identified who the staffers are" that were using the autopen. "We want to find out who was actually making the decisions in the White House during the last nine months of the Biden administration, when he was clearly in mental decline."
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