A legal expert on Friday said it’s unlikely that President Donald Trump will have the legal ability to carry out his bizarre move after he claimed that all laws and pardons under former President Joe Biden signed by autopenwere null and threatened perjury against him if he claims otherwise.
No requirement in the Constitution has said that the president needs to physically sign documents, Berit Berger, a former federal prosecutor, told CNN on Friday afternoon.
“It’s absolutely appropriate for a president to have directed a subordinate to sign for him or to use a document,” Berger said.
It’s unclear what Trump’s legal mechanism is for undoing all the documents Biden signed with an autopen, she added. It’s also difficult to know which exact documents were, in fact, signed by autopen, or which ones Trump has referred to.
Trump has threatened to charge Biden with perjury if he claims he did not use it for a law or pardon. But Berger argued that might not be the actual case, considering the precedent, and that the likelihood that the Department of Justice or Trump could create against him for using the autopen is slim.
“This would also seem very unlikely, again… a Supreme Court decision that granted President Trump wide immunity for acts that were done in his official capacity. Actually, President Biden would be able to rely on that same language and saying that anything that he did in his official capacity, and one could certainly argue that signing pardons or documents, whether he used an autopen or not, was actually in his official capacity. That same immunity would apply to him as well. I’m not exactly sure what perjury President Trump would be referring to but at least, the use of the autopen, given the fact that it has been used by so many presidents in the past, it’s been done so widely, it would be very hard for me to imagine a situation where this would form the basis of any potential criminal liability.”
Trump has not named any exact orders or documents. The autopen has been used among multiple administrations — not just Biden’s administration.
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