Revealed: Emails Showed that White House Staffers Scrambled to Find a Justification for Printing Up "Pardons" the "President" Didn't Even Know About

Unfortunately, the one pardon he signed was for Hunter.

But the rest might be challenged. (Though I have no idea how that would work.)

President Biden's sweeping clemency grants during his final days in office caused concern inside the West Wing and Justice Department about how to ensure his wishes were accurately implemented -- and it's unclear whether Biden himself was consulted before thousands of pardons were announced, internal emails obtained exclusively by The Post show.

The messages indicate the 46th president orally approved commutations for inmates jailed for crack cocaine offenses on Jan. 11 -- but his auto-penned signature wasn't affixed to three documents listing about 2,500 recipients until the morning of Jan. 17.

The debate over who exactly to include in the mass pardons and how to modify their sentences came to a head late on the night of Jan. 16.

Then-White House Staff Secretary Stef Feldman, a key gatekeeper of the presidential autopen, wrote to West Wing lawyers she needed evidence Biden had consented before she authorized a mechanical signature on one of the most sweeping acts of clemency in American history.

"I'm going to need email from [Deputy Assistant to the President] Rosa [Po] on original chain confirming P[resident] signs off on the specific documents when they are ready," Feldman wrote to five other Biden aides at 9:16 p.m.

Six minutes later, deputy White House counsel Tyeesha Dixon, one of the email recipients, forwarded the message to Michael Posada, chief of staff to the White House counsel's office.

"Michael, thoughts on how to handle this?" Dixon asked, adding in reference to the documents authorizing clemency: "He doesn't review the warrants."

"Ok talked to Stef," Posada replied to Dixon at 10:06 p.m.

"We will just need something from Rosa once the documents are ready confirming that the 21 people commuted to home confinement are who the president signed off on in the document titled X, and the # individuals listed in document titled Y are those with crack powder disparities who the president intended to commute," he wrote.

"Basically, something from Rosa making clear that the documents accurately reflect his decision. If you can give me a blurb whenever they are ready to suggest to Rosa, I can pass along."

The mass clemency was announced hours later, at 4:59 a.m.

We have no evidence Biden was ever actually consulted -- and some evidence he wasn't. Note the time the "pardons" were announced -- five in the morning.

The exchange took place well outside of Biden's known regular working schedule -- with White House aides leaking to media outlets months earlier that the Democrat was at his best between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on any given day.

...

It's unclear whether Biden actually gave the final go-ahead as Feldman requested Jan. 16, but the emails suggest that aides instead incorporated Po's attestation of what he "intended" to do.

...

The ex-president's public remarks since then indicate he was not aware that only three documents were required for the roughly 2,500 commutations.

He told the New York Times in July that autopen was used to sign clemency warrants "because there were a lot of them."

In other words: Biden is claiming that "three" clemency warrants is "a lot" and that's why he didn't review each of them.

He clearly is not aware that there were only three warrants he had to review. Each of these warrants set free hundreds of criminals -- and that's his confusion showing. He think that each criminal had his own warrant.

They didn't. They were batch-exonerated.

And Biden is completely unaware of the three (just three!) documents he's supposed to have approved. He thinks there were hundreds of them.

....

However, there were surprising aberrations in which violent criminals were included in the near-immediate clemency grants -- including Russell McIntosh, 51, whose crimes included the 1999 murder of a North Carolina woman who threatened to report him to police and her two-year-old child.

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Legal experts say that auto-signed documents hold full legal force, but must accurately reflect the president's orders, and the emails obtained by The Post indicate attempts to create a paper trail vouching for just that.

Hey guys, did you hear that Trump looks very sick and his health is obviously failing and also that he died last Thursday? It's true, says the media that spent four years claiming an obviously-demented man was mentally fit as a fiddle.

posted by Ace at 01:30 PM

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