President Donald Trump maintained his belief that former President Joe Biden didn't have "much of an idea what was going on" when he served as president when asked Thursday to respond to Biden's dismissal of an investigation into his administration's use of an autopen.
"He was never for open borders. He was never for transgender for everybody. He was never for men playing in women's sports. I mean, he changed," Trump said Thursday from the Oval Office during a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. "I mean, all of these things that that changed so radically. I don't think he had any idea… I said it during the debate and I say it now, he didn't have much of an idea what was going on."
"Essentially, whoever used the autopen was the president, and that is wrong," he added. "It's illegal. It's so bad, and it's so disrespectful to our country."
Trump sent a memo to the Department of Justice Wednesday directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether Biden administration aides conspired to deceive the public about his mental state, and simultaneously used an autopen to sign key presidential actions.
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"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," Trump wrote. "This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history. The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden's signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts."
Biden responded to the memo Wednesday evening, brushing it off as "ridiculous" and a "distraction" put forth by the GOP.
"Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn't is ridiculous and false," Biden said. "This is nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations."
Trump continued in his Thursday comments that the Biden administration's use of an autopen is one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history, remarking that autopens are typically used to send mass amounts of letters - not for official presidential actions.
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"I sign important documents. Usually, when they put documents in front of you, they're important. Even if you're signing ambassadorships or - and I consider that important, I think it's inappropriate," Trump continued. "You have somebody that's devoting four years of their life or more to being an ambassador. I think you really deserve that person deserves to get a real signature, not a, not an autopen signature."
The president added that he can easily identify autopen signatures from genuine pen-to-paper signatures due to "two little pinholes from pulling the paper" that are found on documents.
"I think it's very disrespectful to people when they get an autopen signature," Trump said. "Autopens, to me are used when thousands of letters come in from young people all over the country, and you want to get them back and, you know, people use autopens for that to send, a little signature at the bottom of a letter. We have thousands of them. We get thousands of letters a week, and it's not possible to, you know, though I'd like to do it myself, but you can't do it. That's where autopens start and stop."
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Autopen signatures are automatically produced by a machine, as opposed to an authentic, handwritten signature.
The conservative Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project first investigated the Biden administration's use of an autopen earlier in 2025 and found that the same signature was on a bevvy of executive orders and other official documents, while Biden's signature on the document announcing his departure from the 2024 race varied from the apparent machine-produced signature.
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The reports led to speculation that Biden aides had approved of executive orders and sweeping pardons, not the president.
