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If implemented, Trump’s Truth Social decree would cancel longstanding sanctions on Russia and other adversarial states
Andrew Feinbergin Washington, D.C.Wednesday 03 December 2025 15:36 GMTComments
CloseWhite House replaces President Biden portrait with photo of autopen
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For the second time in less than a week, President Donald Trump claimed to revoke a slew of executive actions by his predecessor on the grounds that they were signed by an autopen device.
Writing on Truth Social on Tuesday, the president said “any and all Documents, Proclamations, Executive Orders, Memorandums, or Contracts” enacted during the Biden administration by way of an autopen device were “hereby null, void, and of no further force or effect.”
He added that recipients of pardons or other grants of executive clemency from Biden should be “advised” that those pardons or commutations have been “fully and completely terminated” and are of “no legal effect.”
Trump’s claim to have nullified Biden’s prior actions comes just five days after a separate post in which he also claimed that “any document” signed by Biden via autopen was “hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect.”
“The Autopen is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the President of the United States,” he said in the previous Friday Truth Social screed.
(Getty Images/AFP)“I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally. Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and, if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury,” Trump added.
The president’s sweeping claim to have invalidated anything executed during the Biden administration with an autopen could have the impact of repealing numerous executive actions which Trump has left in place since returning to the presidency this past January.
That could include at least eight separate orders that have imposed sanctions on Russia and Russian entities as part of the U.S.-led effort to isolate Moscow in the wake of its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as well as other actions meant to counter Chinese influence in the U.S. and protect American supply chains.
The White House did not immediately respond to a query from The Independent listing many of the orders Trump was purporting to revoke in his social media post and asking for clarification on whether his intention was to declare a wholesale rollback of any order signed by Biden with an autopen.
Legal experts acknowledge that Trump does have the power to repeal executive orders and memoranda signed by Biden, but with the caveat that he must do so in an executive order specifying the orders he is revoking.
But Trump’s claim to declare Biden-era commutations and pardons “null and void” is another matter entirely as those cannot be revoked or canceled once issued.
The president’s repeated outbursts about autopen use are part of a concerted campaign to delegitimize Biden, the only person to whom he has lost an election during his decade-plus in politics.
They began earlier this year when the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project released a report claiming that Biden had used the autopen on most of his last-minute executive actions, including pardons for a number of Trump’s political adversaries issued shortly before his term expired on January 20.
That includes what was Biden’s last official act before leaving the White House — the granting of sweeping preemptive pardons to members of his family who’d long been the target of attacks from Trump and his allies, including his brother James Biden and sister-in-law Sara Biden, his brother Frank Biden, his sister Valerie Biden Owens, and her husband John Owens.
At the time, Biden said they, along with the rest of his family, had been “subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics” during his term as president and lamented that he had “no reason to believe these attacks will end.”
He also granted preemptive pardons to Dr Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, and the members of Congress who served on the House committee that investigated the attempted insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6 2021, as well as police officers who testified before the panel and staff members who worked on the committee’s investigation.
Republicans have claimed that Biden’s use of an autopen was evidence that the 46th president was not actually involved in governing because he was too senile to sign the documents in question. But Biden’s former aides have denied that the president’s staff made decisions on his behalf.
Use of an autopen to sign legislation and executive actions has been formally authorized by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel since 2005, when Deputy Assistant Attorney General Howard Nielson Jr. wrote in an opinion authored for the White House Counsel that the president “need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature” to legislation passed by Congress so long as he has directed a subordinate to use an autopen to do so.
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