Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy has the latest on the Department of Justice investigating former President Joe Biden's pardons and his alleged autopen usage on'The Faulkner Focus.' There is mounting evidence that Joe Biden was president in name only during much of his time in office. In his stead, a cabal of top White House staffers appears to have secretly operated a de facto presidency, making crucial decisions without a shred of constitutional authority. If proven true, it would call into question the validity of pardons and executive orders issued under his name but without his knowledge or consent. For this reason, it is imperative that Biden's closest advisers answer questions under oath and others in his orbit be forced to disclose what they knew or observed.

President Joe Biden signs a document with his very own hands.Oliver Contreras/White House/Zuma President Donald Trump has a new hobbyhorse: That his predecessor, President Joe Biden, didn't legally grant pardons to people Trump wants to harass because the pardons were signed with an autopen, a device for replicating a signature, rather than by hand. Trump has identified some signature requirement as the one rule presidents must obey. "The'Pardons' that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen," he ranted on Truth Social just after midnight on Monday. "In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!" Trump and his MAGA allies have embraced a lawless approach to the presidency. Trump's executive orders, actions, and legal filings all point to an understanding of the president as far more powerful than previously understood, with king-like powers over the entire executive branch.

Humming away in offices on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon and in the White House is a technology that represents the pragmatism, efficiency and unsentimental nature of American bureaucracy: the autopen. It is a device that stores a person's signature, replicating it as needed using a mechanical arm that holds a real pen. Like many technologies, this rudimentary robotic signature-maker has always provoked ambivalence. We invest signatures with meaning, particularly when the signer is well known. During the George W Bush administration, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, generated a small wave of outrage when reporters revealed that he had been using an autopen for his signature on the condolence letters that he sent to the families of fallen soldiers. Fans of singer Bob Dylan expressed ire when they discovered that the limited edition of his book The Philosophy of Modern Song, which cost nearly 600 and came with an official certificate "attesting to its having been individually signed by Dylan", in fact had made unlimited use of an autopen. Dylan took the unusual step of issuing a statement on his Facebook page: "With contractual deadlines looming," Dylan wrote, "the idea of using an autopen was suggested to me, along with the assurance that this kind of thing is done'all the time' in the art and literary worlds."