Joe Biden’s last-minute pardons have never passed the smell test for millions of Americans.
Now a House Republican with months of sworn testimony behind him is saying what a lot of people were already thinking.
And James Comer just told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo that every single one of those pardons should be wiped off the books entirely.
The Investigation That Won’t Go Away
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) sat down with Bartiromo recently and laid out what his committee found after months of digging into how Joe Biden’s final pardons actually got issued. The short version: nobody can prove Biden was ever in the room when any of it happened.
Comer told Bartiromo that his committee investigated all of Biden’s pardons and “concluded Joe Biden wasn’t at the table.” There were no meetings with Joe Biden. The Constitution is clear that the president has sole authority to grant pardons, but there is no evidence that Biden was even involved in the pardon process at the time.
Bartiromo pressed him on whether the autopen itself was the main problem. Comer’s answer was sharper than most people expected.
“Well, I don’t think it’s so much the autopen as it is the fact that there were never any meetings that Joe Biden had with his staff on these pardons,” Comer said. “But let’s take the autopen off the table. I know there’s a lot about the autopen. I don’t want that to be the defense. The defense is, there were never scheduled meetings on his calendar, there was not a single person involved in the pardon process, in the decision-making on who authorized the autopen who ever met with Joe Biden and discussed the individual pardons. So, there’s no evidence Joe Biden had any decision-making in the pardon process.”
His conclusion was direct: “So, I think that alone is more than enough evidence to declare all the pardons issued by Joe Biden in last day of his presidency null and void.”
What the 100-Page Report Actually Found
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a staff report titled “The Biden Autopen Presidency: Decline, Delusion, and Deception in the White House,” which exposes how Biden’s top advisors, political operatives, and personal physician concealed his mental and physical decline from the American people. The findings reveal that as Biden’s condition deteriorated, his aides exercised presidential authority and facilitated executive actions without his direct authorization, including misusing the autopen and failing to properly document decision-making processes.
Comer put it plainly during a separate Fox News appearance: “It is astonishing. We are talking about thousands of pardons and dozens of executive orders. Especially during the last three months of the Biden Administration. That’s what the Oversight Committee focused on. Every key Biden staffer who we deposed had a different story on what the proper process was that they followed in using the autopen to sign a legal document. Their stories were inconsistent. Then we have emails from the Merrick Garland Department of Justice expressing concern to these same staffers about the excessive use of the Biden autopen and asked them point blank questions about what their approval process was.”
He continued: “Laura, it is a fact that none of these staffers really saw Joe Biden. No one who authorized the autopen or gave the authorization to use the autopen rarely ever heard directly from Joe Biden. There are no notes. No chain of custody that would show that Joe Biden was involved in any meetings. These staffers confirmed that they would go weeks, months, and even years without communicating with Joe Biden. Some of them even pled the Fifth. This is a massive cover-up and what we determined is that every pardon and executive order should be null and void.”
Three senior Biden aides — Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Annie Tomasini, and Anthony Bernal — were referred to the Department of Justice for further scrutiny after they took the Fifth Amendment during the investigation.
Fauci Was the Whole Point
The Bartiromo interview started with a specific target in mind. Comer made the statement during a discussion with Bartiromo about potentially prosecuting former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci. “We already did the investigation, and we already have criminal referrals sitting on the desk at Department of Justice,” Comer began. “The Senate did the same. Homeland Security also has criminal referrals, dating back a year-and-a-half on Dr. Fauci.”
The pardons Biden issued in his final hours covered a wide range of people, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, members of Congress involved in the January 6 investigation and their staff, including now-Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Washington police officers who testified before that panel.
And the way those pardons got signed is exactly what Comer’s committee spent months trying to unravel. The committee focused specifically on the lack of documentation around a key in-person meeting where the pardons for Biden’s family, Dr. Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley, and members of the January 6 Committee were allegedly finalized. The pardons were conveyed by a “game of telephone,” the committee said.
That description alone should make every American uncomfortable. A “game of telephone” is how you decide what to order for lunch. It is not how you issue a presidential pardon that shields a public official from federal prosecution.
Bondi Is Already Moving
Attorney General Pam Bondi said her staff had “already initiated a review of the Biden administration’s reported use of autopen for pardons” and called the committee’s report “extremely helpful.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson also weighed in, repeating Comer’s calls to void “every executive action signed by the autopen without written authorization from President Biden.”
The ball is now in Bondi’s court. Comer’s committee can declare pardons void all day long — a congressional committee does not have the constitutional authority to declare a presidential action null or void, but the findings could be used by the Department of Justice for an investigation or potentially as part of a legal challenge to certain executive decisions made by Biden, including pardons that he issued.
That’s the honest part of this story that doesn’t get enough attention. Comer knows the committee can’t unilaterally erase a presidential pardon. What the committee can do is build a record that gives the DOJ a roadmap, and that’s apparently what Bondi is now following.
Democrats Called It a “Sham.” Of Course They Did.
“Despite this sham investigation, every White House official testified President Biden fully executed his duties as President of the United States,” said Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. “The testimonies also make it clear the former President authorized every executive order, pardon, and use of the autopen.”
Democrats also released their own counter-report. House Oversight Democrats released a short 14-page counter-report arguing that Republicans had “failed to produce any evidence to support their allegations against President Biden.”
Fourteen pages against a hundred. Draw your own conclusions about which side put in the work.
What Democrats can’t explain away is the Fifth Amendment problem. When your witnesses plead the Fifth rather than answer questions about the pardon process, that is not a sign of a clean operation. That is a sign of people who know their answers would be damaging.
The Bigger Picture Here
Think about what Biden actually pardoned on his way out the door. He pardoned the man who ran the federal COVID response and whose agency funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He pardoned the general who reportedly considered calling his Chinese counterpart behind President Trump’s back. He pardoned the Democrat members of Congress who ran the January 6 Committee. And he pardoned members of his own family — the same family his own Justice Department had been investigating.
Then he did it all through a process so sloppy that his own staffers couldn’t agree on what the procedure was, nobody could produce a paper trail showing Biden personally approved any of it, and three of the key players refused to answer questions under oath.
“The Biden Autopen Presidency will go down as one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history,” Comer said in a statement. “As Americans saw President Biden’s decline with their own eyes, Biden’s inner circle sought to deceive the public, cover-up his decline, and took unauthorized executive actions with the autopen that are now invalid.”
Whether the courts ultimately agree with Comer’s legal conclusion is an open question. But the underlying facts — the missing documentation, the conflicting testimony, the Fifth Amendment invocations, the pardon of politically connected figures who were facing real legal exposure — those aren’t going away regardless of what any judge decides.
Americans who watched Biden stumble through his presidency already knew something was wrong. Now there’s a 100-page report, 47 hours of sworn testimony, and a referral to the Attorney General saying the same thing.
Sources: Mediaite; House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform; Fox News; ABC News; Axios