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I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today’s read: 12 minutes.

Tomorrow’s edition.

For over a month, Tangle Managing Editor Ari Weitzman has been working on a comprehensive piece on climate change, how our understanding has lagged behind the scientific consensus, and what the latest models tell us about what’s coming (spoiler: It’s not what they were saying 10 or 20 years ago).

Before we publish it, we want to quiz the Tangle audience — to see if your understanding has drifted from the truth. Do you know when U.S. carbon emissions peaked, or will peak? Take our survey!

Quick hits.

1. President Donald Trump denied that he plans to attempt to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, though he suggested he could move to oust the chair “for cause” in the near future. (The comments)
2. The Senate voted 51–48 to pass a rescission package that would cancel $9 billion in funding that had previously been approved for international aid and public broadcasting. The package now goes to the House for a vote. (The vote)
3. The Trump administration fired Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor in New York City who worked on the criminal cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The reason for her dismissal has not been specified. (The firing)
4. The Syrian government and leaders in the Druze religious minority announced a ceasefire after several days of conflict and Israeli military intervention. (The truce) Separately, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said at least 20 people were killed in a stampede at an aid distribution site in the southern Gaza Strip. (The incident)
5. The Department of Homeland Security deported five unauthorized immigrants with criminal records to Eswatini, continuing its practice of deporting noncitizens to countries other than their country of origin. (The deportations)

Today’s topic.

Biden’s use of the autopen. On Tuesday, Fox News reported that the White House Counsel’s Office — in coordination with the Justice Department — is investigating former President Joe Biden’s use of an autopen while in office. The Trump administration says the investigation will examine how Biden used the autopen, a machine that reproduces a person’s signature, over his presidential term, and whether the Biden administration had a policy in place to regulate its use. The Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee is also investigating whether Biden understood the actions he authorized with the autopen.

Back up: In the final days of his presidency, Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 2,500 criminal defendants, a single-day record. Biden also issued preemptive pardons for political figures and members of his family shortly before President Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, which prompted further scrutiny about the clemency actions. The former president justified the pardons as a protection against ongoing “baseless and politically motivated investigations.” Separately, in December, Biden commuted the sentences of approximately 1,500 people and pardoned 39 others, including former elected officials who had been convicted of racketeering and embezzlement.

We covered Biden’s final acts of clemency here and here.

On Thursday, July 10, Biden told The New York Times that he had orally granted all the pardons and commutations issued at the end of his term and rejected suggestions that he deferred any decisions to his staff. The former president said he used the autopen because of the quantity of clemency decisions issued and noted that other presidents have also used the tool. Separately, he called Republicans who suggested that he was incapacitated in office “liars.”

House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) has sought to subpoena Biden administration officials to testify about the president’s mental fitness in office. Some members of Biden’s staff, such as his Deputy Chief of Staff Annie Tomasini, have agreed to speak with investigators, but others have declined to cooperate. White House Physician Kevin O’Connor invoked physician-patient privilege and Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in declining to sit for a deposition, and former First Lady Jill Biden’s Chief of Staff Anthony Bernal also pleaded the Fifth.

Many legal experts say Biden’s acts of clemency cannot be voided regardless of what the investigations might find and despite President Trump’s claims. “The Constitution doesn't even require that the pardon be written,” Bernadette Meyler, a Stanford Law School professor and constitutional law expert, said. “So the idea that the signature is by autopen rather than by handwritten signature seems not relevant.”

Today, we’ll explore the debate over Biden’s autopen use, with views from the right and left. Then, my take.

What the right is saying.

• Most on the right view the story as a scandal that underscores Biden’s limited capacity in office.
• Some say Biden further incriminated himself in his New York Times interview.
• Others say Trump’s argument is legally weak but politically salient.

The New York Post editorial board said “Biden’s ‘defense’ of aides who used his autopen speaks volumes about who was REALLY in charge.”

“Biden claimed he ‘made every decision’ himself when it came to the 25 autopen-signed pardon and commutation warrants that his White House issued in the final months of his presidency. But then he admitted that he didn’t explicitly agree to each and every clemency winner. His excuse: ‘We’re talking about a whole lot of people,’” the board wrote. “Exactly how involved was he? Not very: The Biden White House had a ‘process’ for approving the pardons that seemed to only minimally include him.”

“Biden didn’t seem bothered by his staff’s liberal use of autopen, but he has a stake in pushing the narrative that he was A-OK with the setup. What’s left of his battered legacy (and his pride) would be further tarnished by an admission that he wasn’t fully in charge,” the board said. “Joe clearly meant to take the heat off by telling the Times he was the one making the decisions. But his own words put the lie to that. All they do is confirm that the GOPers trying to get answers about who was running the country under Biden are on the right track.”

In National Review, Jeffrey Blehar wrote about “Biden’s autopen folly.”

“[Biden] certainly seems to have no idea whom specifically he was pardoning or if his aides had faithfully applied his criteria. (I’m pretty sure that he wasn’t trying to commute the sentence of Jimmy Dimora, for example, one of the most corrupt men in the last half century of Ohio politics.) Biden has managed to thicken the cloud of suspicion that hangs over all domestic political acts taken during his presidency,” Blehar said. “The funniest thing about this self-inflicted damage, though, is how needless it was. Why is Biden out there giving this self-defeating [New York Times] interview anyway? Nobody actually cares whether Biden was using an autopen — there is no legal argument to be made here.

“Trump was as serious about undoing Biden’s laws and pardons over the autopen issue as he is about deporting Rosie O’Donnell. Trump could not undo those commutations even if he wanted to, and he most certainly doesn’t want to — they’re a political gift to him, a way to shift blame to ‘Senile Joe’ when Trump is feeling the heat,” Blehar wrote. “All Biden had to do was remain silent. But the vain old man simply can’t help himself; even in his extreme dotage, character remains destiny.”

In The Dispatch, Nick Catoggio explored “earnest and cynical reasons to care about Joe Biden’s ‘autopen’ pardons.”

“I don’t think Trump’s interest in the matter is particularly complicated. He envisioned his second presidency as an exercise in ‘retribution,’ and Biden’s last-minute pardons deprived him of the targets he was most eager to hit,” Catoggio said. “Another reason for Republican interest in the autopen matter is that MAGA has always run on conspiracy theories, from Barack Obama’s birth certificate to the ‘deep state’ plot against Trump to the rigged election of 2020 to the Jeffrey Epstein client list. There’s no degree of civic or moral corruption to which liberals won’t stoop to cling to power: That’s the grassroots right’s core conviction.”

“ L’affaire autopen is useful in a third way to Trump. It’s a reminder, albeit a pitiful one, to voters that no matter how unhappy they might be with him, things could be worse,” Catoggio wrote. “In that respect, the autopen pardons were a godsend. Granting clemency to presidential relatives was shady as hell; doing it via a dubious process guaranteed to invite suspicions about Biden’s competence and the lawfulness of his orders was icing on the cake.”

What the left is saying.

• The left calls the story a fabricated scandal, arguing that Biden’s use of the autopen was perfectly legal.
• Some say the investigations are more about scoring political points than uncovering any wrongdoing.
• Others suggest Trump is fixated on painting Biden as an illegitimate president.

In MSNBC, Hayes Brown wrote “presidents using autopens is not a crime.”

“Trump’s obsession with the use of an autopen in Biden’s White House stretches back months. He claimed in March that pardons Biden signed were supposedly void because of an autopen’s use. Last month, he foreshadowed to reporters that his administration would ‘start looking into this whole thing with who signed this legislation,’” Brown said. “It’s a bonkers line of inquiry, not least because autopens aren’t exactly a new thing for a chief executive to use. Presidents going back to Harry Truman have had them around to sign their name to personal documents and correspondence.”

“Whatever probe Bondi conducts would theoretically hinge not on whether the White House autopen was used to sign official documents but on somehow proving that it was used without Biden’s express authorization. Is there any evidence backing up Trump’s allegation? Of course not, and Trump himself said as much,” Brown wrote. “None of this will amount to anything legally without concrete evidence that a law or other official document was falsely signed without Biden’s consent. In both reality and the conspiracy theory being spun here, the autopen is merely a tool to be used.”

In The Washington Post, Philip Bump suggested “the GOP doesn’t really care how the pardons were signed.”

“There is no serious question that Biden fully intended to issue the flurry of pardons that bore his signature in the waning days of his presidency. Yet thanks to a combination of a media cycle fixated on Biden’s mental capacity and the opportunism of the Trump White House, right-wing media (and Fox News in particular) are now heavily invested in the idea that he didn’t,” Bump said. “This isn’t a mystery requiring a solution. Biden talked about the pardons. In fact, there was a great deal of public discussion on the subject, which is why reporters kept asking him about them.”

“The goal of the conversation is to cast a pall of illegitimacy over everything that occurred during Biden’s administration. On any issue or decision, Trump and his allies have leaned into dismissing Biden’s work as a function of some nefarious non-presidential actor, as with Watters’s deranged musings about the former first lady seizing control of the pen,” Bump wrote. “If the Justice Department or Republicans on the House Oversight Committee or Trump and his team want to know whether Biden approved of the pardons that he approved, they can hear it from the man himself. But that’s not really what they want to know.”

In Salon, Austin Sarat said “it’s not about the autopen — Trump is still obsessed with losing to Biden.”

“Autopens? Really? With all the problems confronting this country, our president is focused on autopens,” Sarat wrote. “Nothing in the Constitution requires a president to sign a pardon. Article II says only that the president ‘shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.’ It does not specify any particular form or procedure to make such a grant.”

“But for President Trump, well-researched and reasoned legal opinions, court decisions, and the views of experts matter less than the latest conspiracy theory floated by his right-wing, MAGA allies,” Sarat said. “The president may get pleasure from using the autopen nonsense to replay some of his greatest hits and suggest, yet again, that ‘a senile Biden was not in charge as president.’ At the same time, it allows him to promote one of his favorite conspiracy theories, namely that his predecessor was the tool of a ‘“deep state” (that) pulled the strings.’”

My take.

Reminder: “My take” is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• In one version of this story, Biden used an autopen for efficiency and Trump is hammering him for it for political reasons.
• In the other, Biden was unaware of what he authorized — and may not have been involved at all.
• Either version is problematic to me, and pursuing clearer answers about what happened is not conspiratorial or absurd.

We can tell two stories about Biden’s autopen; one is uncomplicated and legally straightforward, and the other raises all sorts of reasonable questions (and reminders) about the flaws of the Biden administration.

Here’s the uncomplicated story: President Biden was in the last few weeks of his presidency. He wanted to protect many people he thought Trump would go after, and also commute the sentences of people with criminal records he believed should be given some grace. The president was, by many accounts, limited in his capacity to do the job; so when his staff brought him a collection of pardons and commutations, he offloaded the physical work of signing the pardons to the “autopen,” which was managed closely by his top aides. Autopens aren’t new — presidents have used them for years, typically to sign things like letters to Americans (though some presidents, including Obama, have used it for legislation).

Biden commuted a lot of sentences — literally a historical amount — and it seems pretty clear he wanted all of them to happen.

Trump, who had not been shy about campaigning on on his enemies from the first term, was incensed that Biden did this. When he discovered that Biden himself may not have signed all the pardons by hand, his political instincts kicked in; he saw a clear opportunity to raise questions about “who was really in charge,” take shots at Biden’s mental acuity and distract the media from the Epstein story, which is currently tearing his base apart. Biden, rather than just ignoring the noise and letting the story die, couldn’t help but give an interview to The New York Times — where he gave a series of halting, hard-to-read, confused answers, drawing more attention to the controversy and making the situation markedly worse.

That’s the first story. No evidence shows that any pardons were signed off without the president’s approval (yet), Biden himself spoke publicly about many of the pardons at the time, and he seemed to remember his justification for quite a few of them in his interview with The New York Times (even if his answers were characteristically garbled and hard to understand). For a lot of people, this story is sufficient and the saga doesn’t go any further than that.

The second story is a bit more complex, but also entirely feasible. First, and most importantly, many of Biden’s pardons ranged from suspect to shocking. The Hunter Biden pardon was a political mistake, but a slew of others are so hard to justify that they can only be explained by outright malice or sheer negligence: Michael Conahan, who perpetrated the “Kids for Cash” scheme in Pennsylvania; Rita Crundwell, who committed the largest municipal fraud in U.S. history; Jim Carlson, who ran a synthetic drug ring in Minnesota, tested drugs on his own employees, and caused a public health crisis in Duluth.

These are not the kinds of people who deserve clemency, but they got it from the Biden administration.

Learning now that Biden himself may not have been the person to actually sign off on these pardons is pretty jarring. On the one hand, I don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill. On the other hand, is it really too much to ask that the president actually sign the pardons he is approving by hand? Is that too high a standard? I understand that some of the lack of oversight can be explained by the fact that the pardons were issued en masse, but they did not need to be — that was (supposedly) the president’s choice. And to make it perfectly clear, Biden did not have to sign thousands of individual pieces of paper to make this happen — if he did, that would have provided a good excuse for using the autopen. But in reality, he only needed to sign a few dozen proclamations that covered thousands of people.

The worst-case scenario is not entirely implausible here, either: Were Biden’s staff and aides working in concert to elevate pardons or clemency that they wanted to see, and then pushing them through without oversight from Biden because the process was somewhat disconnected from the president himself? We know, from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book, that some people believe a group of high-level aides were effectively running the country in the end. We also know, from New York Times reporting, that Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients was approving the use of the autopen for pardons via email. It’s not at all unreasonable to ask if Zients was working on Biden’s wishes or his own.

All of this speculation comes from Biden’s abdication of a very basic duty. If you decide to grant clemency to hundreds or thousands of people, and you apparently aren’t reviewing each individual case in its own right, then I think you should do the laborious act of signing your own name to it. That’s the job. And if Biden was not capable of signing his name to the 25 pardon and commutation warrants issued between December 2024 and January 2025 — because he didn’t have the physical ability, the interest, or the thirty seconds — that’s a separate problem that needs to be addressed.

Even though Biden is no longer president, Republicans are all too happy to address it.

Now, are their motives pure and apolitical? Of course not. And is this issue really that important, given everything else happening in the world right now? Again, no. But the degree to which Biden was in control at the end of his presidency is a very important issue, and even though the autopen question isn’t central to it, the questions it raises can help us learn more about Biden’s mental state and leadership towards the end of his term. His own decisions, from the use of the autopen to his insistence to stay in the 2024 race until it was too late for Democrats to manage a transition, precipitated the kind of coverage he’s getting now. That’s not anyone’s fault but his.

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Your questions, answered.

Q: Are confirmation hearings conducted under oath, and if so, has a cabinet member ever been brought up on perjury charges after demonstrably doing the thing they said they wouldn't?

— Marc from Tulsa, Oklahoma

Tangle: To your first question, yes, it is standard practice for nominees for appointed positions to swear an oath to tell the truth before their Congressional appointment hearings. But no, no one has been charged with perjury for false statements during their nomination hearings. There are a few reasons for this.

First, prosecutors have to clear a high bar to successfully charge someone with perjury. According to the U.S. statute that defines perjury, the accused must be shown to have made not just a misleading or vague statement, but one that was blatantly false, material to their testimony, and given knowingly and willfully. This legal standard rules out someone making a promise during their hearing that they later break.

Furthermore, if some members of Congress accuse a nominee of perjury during their trial, that person has the opportunity to amend their testimony through a written statement before being charged. This happened in 2017, when all nine Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee accused the recently confirmed Attorney General Jeff Sessions of perjury for misrepresenting his contact with Russia during his confirmation hearing. Sessions then submitted amended testimony, and said he would recuse himself from any investigation into President Trump for alleged connections to Russia.

Other nominees were accused of lying under oath, but no charges were filed. This happened when the Senate rejected President George H. W. Bush’s nomination of John Tower for Secretary of Defense in 1989 for lying about his drinking. Some successful nominees, like Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, were not charged, likely because of the difficulty of winning a conviction and the political fallout that the legal accusations would have created.

However, some people who have given Congressional testimony not as nominees have later been convicted of perjury. This group includes Watergate co-conspirator G. Gordon Liddy and sprinter Marion Jones. Others, like President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, likely committed perjury but pleaded guilty to other crimes. And perhaps most memorably, President Bill Clinton was impeached for lying to Congress about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, though Congress did not vote to remove him from office.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

On Tuesday, the Institute for Science and International Security released a report on the impact of Israel’s killings of top Iranian nuclear scientists in June. The report found that these deaths “deprived Iran’s nuclear weapons program of its most capable and experienced personnel” and “weakened Iran’s base for building nuclear weapons, eliminating needed expertise and hard-to-get management experience.” While Israel has targeted Iranian scientists in the past, the institute said those killings did not significantly disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. This time, however, they suggest that the attacks may be far more difficult for Iran to recover from, noting both the loss of those scientists’ critical knowledge and the chilling effect their deaths could have on Iran’s remaining nuclear scientists. You can read the report here.

Numbers.

• 1803. The year the autopen was patented (originally known as a “polygraph machine”).
• 2005. The year the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department published a memorandum opinion that the president may use an autopen to sign legislation.
• 2011. The year that President Barack Obama used an autopen to sign an extension of the Patriot Act, the first use of the machine to sign legislation.
• 4,245. The number of acts of clemency granted by President Joe Biden during his term, the most of any president on record, according to Pew Research.
• 29%. The percentage of requests for clemency granted by Biden during his term.
• 80. The number of pardons issued by Biden, the second fewest on record.
• 2,490. The number of commutations granted by Biden on January 17, 2025, more in a single day than any prior president had granted over their entire presidency.
• 96%. The percentage of Biden’s acts of clemency granted during the final fiscal year of his presidency.

The extras.

• One year ago today we wrote about the dismissal of Trump’s classified documents case.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the gerrymandering plan in Texas.
• Nothing to do with politics:Pointer Pointer — a webpage that points to your pointer, and also helps you relive the joys of attending an early 2000s party.
• Something to do with politics: Prefer quick videos? Senior Editor Will Kaback covered today’s topic in just a minute and a half in an Instagram Reel.
• Yesterday’s survey: 2,774 readers responded to our survey on Fed Chair Jerome Powell and the Fed’s interest rates with 82% saying Powell should not be fired and rates should not be cut. “The independence of the Fed is crucial to the economic stability of the country,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

Mount Everest has long struggled with trash accumulation on its slopes, and for years Sherpas have navigated a dangerous, four-hour hike to remove the garbage. However, this season, they had assistance from two giant drones that can complete the perilous 700-meter route in six minutes. Lhakpa Nuru Sherpa, a 33-year-old working at the expeditions firm Asian Trekking, estimates that drones have transported over 70% of the garbage carted off the mountain by his team this year. “We’re very happy,” he said. “We want more drones carrying heavier weights.” Bloomberg has the story.

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