A Florida Democrat has criticized House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans for being “cowards” for fixating on Joe Biden while President Donald Trump is “mired in corruption.”
Rep. Darren Soto, 47, called out Johnson, 53, for insisting during a press conference on Tuesday that Biden’s use of the autopen to issue pardons and clemencies was a scandalous “cover-up.” Johnson also alluded to Biden, 82, showing his age near the end of his term.
Trump shows daily signs of mental decline and is mired in corruption. Yet these cowards do NOTHING.But yeah the autopen… 🤷 https://t.co/RzZoArkhhM
— Rep. Darren Soto (@RepDarrenSoto) October 28, 2025
“Trump shows daily signs of mental decline and is mired in corruption,” Soto, a five-term congressman from Florida’s ninth congressional district, wrote on X in response to Johnson speaking while flanked by Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman and other Republicans. ”Yet these cowards do nothing.”
“But yeah the autopen,” Soto added with a shrugging emoji.
Neither Johnson’s office nor the White House, which has also sought to make an issue of the autopen, immediately responded to a Daily Beast inquiry.
Biden has defended his use of the autopen, citing the volume of executive actions he took in his final days in office, which were about 4,000, according to a New York Times count.
“There was no conspiracy, no cover up, and no wrongdoing. Congressional Republicans should stop focusing on political retribution and instead work to end the government shutdown,” a Biden spokesperson said Tuesday, following the GOP-led House Oversight Committee’s report arguing that orders signed by autopen were “null and void.” Trump, 79, has argued the same.
Johnson backed that report.
“The Biden administration was unprecedented in so many ways, and the President was checked out of his job for quite some time, and everybody knows it,” he said Tuesday. “And there was a cover-up the people around him who were using they would give him scripts to follow. They would point him literally in the direction. ‘Stand here, sir, wave like this,’ and he didn’t know what he was signing.”
“So there’s all sorts of just incredible implications. It sounds like a terrible novel or something, but this is reality, and so the pardons, for example, he pardoned categories of violent criminals and turned them loose on the streets, and he didn’t even know who,” Johnson went on.
“He didn’t even know what the categories were, apparently, much less the individual people that he pardoned. They’re invalid on their face,” he argued, adding that “you can’t allow a president to check out and have unelected, unaccountable, faceless people making massive decisions for the country.”
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