Does the Biden Autopen Scandal “Go Back to Barack Obama?”

by Sharon Rondeau

(May 30, 2025) — On Friday “Hannity” host Sean Hannity dedicated his show to the subject of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline while in the White House and its “cover-up” by the media, administration staffers and Biden’s family members given the admissions emerging almost daily about Biden’s lack of ability at the time.

In a segment with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) Friday evening, Paul told Hannity if Biden did not sign the laws and executive orders bearing his name, it will be a “catastrophe” for the country.

In recent weeks, particularly over the last several days, President Trump and a growing number of congressmen have claimed Biden had no knowledge of the documents signed with Biden’s signature by “autopen,” an instrument which some legal experts say is allowable only if the person whose signature is facsimiled is aware of and consents to the act.

Paul told Hannity while Biden was in office, an ill-kept secret in Washington, DC was Biden’s unofficial name of “Mrs. Wilson,” a reference to President Woodrow Wilson’s wife Edith, who ran the White House while her husband was rendered incapable following a stroke.

“What would surprise most Americans today is how the entire affair, including Wilson’s extended illness and long-term disability, was shrouded in secrecy,” PBS reported in a 2015 exposé of the Wilson presidency. “In recent years, the discovery of the presidential physicians’ clinical notes at the time of the illness confirm that the president’s stroke left him severely paralyzed on his left side and partially blind in his right eye, along with the emotional maelstroms that accompany any serious, life-threatening illness, but especially one that attacks the brain. Only a few weeks after his stroke, Wilson suffered a urinary tract infection that threatened to kill him. Fortunately, the president’s body was strong enough to fight that infection off but he also experienced another attack of influenza in January of 1920, which further damaged his health.”

Previous to Paul, Sen. Josh Hawley appeared and said a U.S. Secret Service agent informed him Biden would often “get lost in his closet,” further illustrating Biden’s inability to serve and make decisions.

The House Oversight Committee is seeking interviews with four Biden White House aides as well as the former president’s primary care and White House physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, whose reports from 2019 through 2024 say Biden was not only in good health, but also “vigorous,” “active” and fit to serve as the nation’s leader and commander-in-chief.

Thursday was Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s (R-KY1) deadline for the five Biden confidants to respond to his requests for testimony and/or transcribed interviews.

As of this writing, Comer has not announced whether he will issue subpoenas, although in the absence of voluntary cooperation from the five individuals named in Comer’s May 22 letters, he has indicated it could be a next step.

On Wednesday, Comer said he would consider asking Jill Biden, Hunter Biden and Biden’s original chief of staff, longtime Democrat political figure Ron Klain.

Trump has said the people who operated the autopen without Biden’s knowledge placed the nation in “great danger,” “stole the presidency,” and are guilty of “treason at the highest level.”

At 9:26 p.m. EDT., Hannity called the “cover-up” of Biden’s cognitive decline “shocking.”

“All we ever heard was the White House party line: Joe Biden is fine,” Hannity recounted, followed by broadcast clips from CNN and MSNBC attempting to make the case that Biden was being compromised by “cheap fakes,” a term coined by then-White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre from the podium.

Minutes later, Hannity spoke with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who said on one given day toward the end of Biden’s term, “2,400 pardons” were issued by “autopen.”

“If somebody in a nursing home were being as lied about and covered up, it would be a crime,” Gingrich continued. He described Biden as “humiliated” and asked, “Who was running the government? Who was violating the Constitution?…I think a lot of it is going to go back to Barack Obama…who was making these decisions? More people were commuted by Biden after the election than the last ten presidencies…”

For its role in the deception about Biden’s health, he denounced the media as “totally discredited,” similar to the “Democrat Party.”

Some have characterized the use of the presidential autopen as “forgery” and claimed Biden’s executive orders and laws bearing an autopen signature without his consent might not withstand scrutiny by the House of Representatives and Justice Department.

There may have been more than one autopen, The Washington Examiner reported May 23.

As Obama’s vice president for eight years, Biden was undoubtedly aware of the questions surrounding the public release of an image said to represent Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate allegedly held by the Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH). However, a criminal investigation conducted by an adjunct of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) between August 2011 and December 2016 early on declared the image a “computer-generated forgery,” later identifying an authentic birth record they said was used as a template for the creation of a fraudulent birth record for Obama.

Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the Constitution requires the president and commander-in-chief to be a “natural born Citizen,” which most Americans interpret to mean, at a minimum, “born in the United States.”

In recent history, “birthright citizenship,” questions about which are currently under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court following Trump’s issuance of a January 20 executive order curtailing it, has been conflated with “natural born Citizen.”

Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, who oversaw the five-year probe conducted by former private investigator and former detective Mike Zullo, suggested in his 2020 memoir that Obama was a “naturalized citizen” constitutionally ineligible to serve as president.

It was an “open secret” in the nation’s capital, Zullo said on a 2018 radio show, that Obama was not born in the United States, which was confirmed to him by two U.S. intelligence agents.

“The only hope that history gets this right in the near term is an unfettered President Donald J. Trump in a second term,” Arpaio wrote in a book chapter on the birth certificate probe. “If not, history may not tell the real story for 50 years—if ever.”