US President Donald Trump has ordered an investigation into the health of his predecessor Joe Biden as head of state and the use of a sign language interpreter by his aides to sign documents. The memorandum was published on the White House website on Wednesday.Â
“In recent months, it has become increasingly apparent that former President Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority,” the document says.
The American public may have been deliberately misled about who actually holds executive power, while Biden’s signature “was used on thousands of documents” to implement radical policy changes, the memorandum said.
The document emphasises that most of Biden’s executive orders were signed with a pen-holder, not by the president himself. This is “particularly notable” for executive orders issued in the second half of his presidency, when his cognitive impairments “became even more apparent to those who worked with him,” the document says.
Biden’s autopen scandal
Earlier, Trump called the scandal involving Biden’s autopen one of the biggest in US history. In his opinion, the pardons signed with the help of an autopen and issued by the Biden administration are invalid.
The New York Post previously reported, citing two former White House officials, that one of Biden’s key aides may have exceeded his authority by using a pen-and-paper to sign official documents.
At the end of May, Republican James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said on Fox News that four White House staffers had been identified who used a signer to sign documents on Biden’s behalf.
In early June, the US Department of Justice was instructed to investigate Biden’s decision to pardon members of his family and commute the sentences of 37 prisoners who had been sentenced to death to life imprisonment.
