Under oath, the former director for the White House Domestic Policy Council, Neera Tanden, testified that she did, in fact, use the autopen to sign orders for President Biden. She claimed she was only using the precedent set by past administrations.
Tanden’s activist past makes the decision to give her autopen authority even more suspicious. Former White House stenographer Mike McCormick testified to congress that Tanden was a “super aggressive, very progressive operative.” He also said if there was one person willing to act on behalf of Biden without his knowledge to push a far-left agenda, “She would be the person…If she came into his White House knowing that [Biden] was debilitated, would she be the kind of person who would take advantage of that? I think she would.”
Neera Tanden and the Biden autopen: Probe progresses with help of Trump-centered poetic justice– www.theblaze.com
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Neera Tanden, a prominent fixture in the Democratic establishment who served as director of the Biden White House Domestic Policy Council, appeared before the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday for hours-long, closed-door testimony concerning Biden’s cognitive decline while in office, its cover-up, and its alleged exploitation behind the scenes.
Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, Tanden, a former Hillary Clinton aide, stuck with the narrative that Biden was mentally fit during his tenure, her opening statement showed. She also suggested that the controversial use of the autopen — a machine used to affix Biden’s signature to a myriad of documents, which critics suspect was abused by unelected individuals to advance radical agendas and to circumvent the will of the American people — was above-board.
Tanden’s spin notwithstanding, congressional investigators appear to have made headway on Tuesday thanks in part to some poetic justice.
Shield withdrawn
Despite protest from President Donald Trump and warnings from numerous critics about setting an undesirable precedent, Biden waived executive privilege in October 2021 and directed the National Archives to furnish congressional partisans with Trump-era White House records pertaining to the Jan. 6 protest at the U.S. Capitol.
Biden’s counsel noted in a letter that asserting executive privilege was “not in the best interests of the United States.”
University of Virginia School of Law professor Saikrishna Prakash, among the legal scholars at the time who understood this move could come back to bite Biden and his advisers, told the Associated Press, “Every time a president does something controversial, it becomes a building block for future presidents.”
Trump stacked on this building block this week in the interest of helping along the Oversight Committee’s investigation into the autopen scandal.
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In a jaw-dropping revelation that should shake every American to their core, former Biden advisor Neera Tanden has admitted under oath that she — not Joe Biden — was in control of the president’s autopen for nearly two years.
A top White House aide, utterly unelected and unknown to most of the country, had the authority to affix the President’s signature to official documents, including sweeping executive orders and controversial pardons, all while the nation was led to believe these were the deliberate actions of the commander-in-chief himself.
“As staff secretary, I was responsible for handling the flow of documents to and from the president,” she testified. “I was also authorized to direct that autopen signatures be affixed to certain categories of documents.”
This isn’t some minor bureaucratic quirk. Tanden’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee exposes a chilling reality: for a significant stretch of Biden’s presidency, the man who was supposed to be in charge may have been little more than a figurehead, with crucial decisions and official acts rubber-stamped by staffers operating behind the scenes.
Tanden, who served as Senior Advisor and later as Staff Secretary, openly acknowledged that from October 2021 to May 2023, she was authorized to direct the use of the autopen on Biden’s behalf.
“We had a system for authorizing the use of the autopen that I inherited from prior administrations,” Tanden claimed. “We employed that system throughout my tenure as staff secretary.”
Despite her admission, she insists there was no abuse of the autopen or a cover-up.