I’m mildly amused by the “autopen” controversy. Not by the details of it, of course. In substance, it is one of the worst scandals in the history of the presidency. It’s on a par with Woodrow Wilson’s final two years in office, when a series of strokes, including a major one in October 1919, left him so incapacitated that he could not function. His wife and doctor managed his administration for the last year-and-a-half of his second term (including the crucial aftermath of World War I, which laid the pathway to World War II).
I say “par” because these things are hard to quantify. Joe Biden was diminished mentally and physically, and deteriorating rapidly, but he was not as incapacitated as Wilson. On the other hand, a century after Wilson, the presidency is more domestically and globally consequential, and more physically and mentally exhausting, than it was in 1920 — even factoring in staff, resources, courtiers, and monarchal comforts that Wilson couldn’t have dreamt of (and coming soon: a Qatari “palace in the sky” and a ballroom that would have greened Louis XIV with envy).
The only constitutional way to strip power from a president, other than impeachment, is the 25th Amendment. It was adopted in 1964, in the aftermath of the shocking Kennedy assassination. JFK succumbed quickly but he could potentially have lingered on the cusp of death for months. Mindful of both that and the Wilson precedent, the 25th Amendment’s ratifiers sought to address undoubted incapacity. Those who complain that the amendment is impractical are missing the point. If we had a president who was in a coma with no brain function, the Amendment would be quite practical and uncontroversially implemented. The problem is our modern dilemma, for which the amendment was not designed.
Today, life expectancy in America is close to 80. In the Wilson era it was around 55, and even in 1964 it was just 70. The 25th Amendment strove simultaneously (a) to deal with a president who clinically could not function as such, but (b) to respect that, in the absence of such dire incapacity, the president elected by the people should not be ousted except for impeachment-worthy misconduct.
The amendment’s proponents did not fathom that the people would start electing soon-to-be octogenarians. They were not thinking about the Biden gray area: the incumbent who is not wholly unfit, but who is manifestly not up to the rigors of the American presidency. Because the methods of nominating candidates and the judgment of voters are not improving, we need new amendments fit for our time: maximum age limits for public office (the Constitution imposes only minimum age mandates) and a process — analogous to but more flexible than the 25th Amendment’s — which enables the necessary sidelining, but not the pretextual sidelining, of a president who is badly diminished even if still compos mentis.
Speaking of amendments fit for our time, I said I am mildly amused by the ongoing controversy, which Republicans label the “autopen presidency.” That’s because they don’t call it what it really is: the pardon scandal — which is to say, yet another scandal involving a constitutional power of the presidency that should have been repealed years ago and has become synonymous with corruption.
Presidents have used the autopen since the technology became accessible. Given the volume of mundane, ministerial matters that call for the chief executive’s signature, there’s been nothing sordid about it. What was jaw-droppingly scurrilous about Biden’s autopen use — or, I should say, the Biden White House staff’s autopen use — were the pardons. The autopen was used to execute a record number of clemency grants, including for hardened criminals progressive Biden staffers risibly described as “nonviolent.”
The autopen scandal is notable, it involves notoriously impeachable conduct, because it was a gross abuse of the pardon power. At bottom, Biden may — in his diminished, detached way — have participated in the concoction of broad clemency parameters; but it was his staff who filled in the blanks (including the names, many of which the president didn’t know) and issued the pardons.
Despite Attorney General Pamela Bondi’s grandstanding, there’s nothing the Justice Department can do about this. Biden was president, the pardons were issued on his authority, he has said publicly he approved them (in some vague way), and they were official acts at the core of executive power. As the Supreme Court held in the immunity case (Trump v. United States, also known in the Trump administration as The Highest Law), courts are not going to second-guess official executive acts by inquiring into the president’s state of mind (whether that involves corrupt motivation or mindlessness that hasn’t been certified as such by the 25th Amendment).
No one is going to be prosecuted over the Biden pardons, which will not be judicially nullified. Under the immunity ruling, it is up to Congress to address executive misconduct. Beyond the Comer committee’s exposure of the autopen pardon malfeasance, there is nothing more to be done. Biden is out of office, and, in the post-Capitol riot impeachment proceedings, Republicans took the position that impeachment may not be applied to disqualify a president who is no longer in power — even one who is constitutionally eligible to run again.
Which leads us to the current president — the one who was impeached but not convicted or disqualified in 2021.
It turns out that Republicans outraged by Biden are left to grouse about the “autopen presidency” rather than inveighing about abuse of the pardon power because President Trump characteristically stepped on their story. Just as Comer rolled out his ballyhooed Biden report, Trump granted a pardon that surpasses the sheer graft of Bill Clinton’s then-stupefying Marc Rich pardon.
President Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, who got unfathomably rich by structuring his cryptocurrency exchange to facilitate crime and the evasion of American sanctions. Just this spring, while lobbying for clemency for his felony convictions (in connection with which the exchange he founded, Binance, was subjected to over $4 billion in forfeitures and fines), Zhao orchestrated the $2 billion purchase of a new “stablecoin,” called USD1, marketed by the Trump family crypto business, World Liberty Financial.
Stablecoin is designed to function more like currency than other crypto tokens by virtue of its being backed by stable currencies (such as the dollar, to which USD1 hoped to be roughly pegged). This means Stablecoin backers, such as President Trump, his sons, and his other business partners, function like a bank: Stablecoin is the deposit and the funds used to purchase it are reserves; stablecoin marketers invest these reserves in securities backed by the U.S. Treasury, an extremely lucrative business. As the Wall Street Journal explains, a $2 billion purchase of stablecoin would generate about $80 million in annual profit for the marketers.
In this instance, Zhao figured out a way to help the president’s crypto enterprise get off the ground while making a big score for Binance. After being purchased for $2 billion, the USD1 stablecoin would be transferred to the Binance exchange for trading purposes. This would concurrently (a) solidify the upstart USD1 stablecoin, thereby making both it and the Trump family’s related crypto ventures more attractive and profitable; and (b) raise the prestige of Binance, even as it was under U.S. government monitoring because of its money laundering offenses.
To pull this off, Zhao and the Trump crypto enterprise needed a suitable third party. They found one: the United Arab Emirates, duly attracted by the possibilities of association with an American president and the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. For the transaction, the UAE used a nominee investment firm, MGX, which is run by Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a UAE security official who is the half-brother of the Islamic regime’s ruler, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Back in May, I began an occasional series on the Trump family’s multifaceted crypto enterprise (see here, here, here, and here) by discussing Zhao and the UAE:
The unfolding story is going to drive media-Democratic complex yowling for the next two years, leading into the 2026 midterms and, if Democrats take one or both houses of Congress, potentially to 2027 impeachment proceedings that are already being contemplated. . . . [A] blockbuster [New York] Times report — “Secret Deals, Foreign Investments, Presidential Policy Changes: The Rise of Trump’s Crypto Firm” — is alarming. So was the follow-up report two days later, after the announcement that an entity controlled by a foreign regime, the United Arab Emirates, would buy $2 billion of the Trump family’s new “stablecoin” (a digital currency whose producers function, and generate income, like a bank) to consummate an investment in Binance — a crypto exchange. And not just any crypto exchange: Binance is under U.S. government monitoring because of its criminal violations of federal money-laundering laws. In 2023, Binance’s founder and now Trump business partner, Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born Canadian billionaire, pled guilty to a felony money-laundering charge that landed him in prison for four months. He is said to be lobbying the president for a pardon.
Now he’s got his pardon. And Zhao did more to earn it than previously known. The above-linked WSJ report relates that, while Zhao sought the pardon, Binance “committed a team including its Hong Kong-based stablecoin chief to build the blockchain technology for USD1.”
Meantime, UAE has done pretty well for itself, too. In May, shortly after the $2 billion USD1 purchase, the president visited Abu Dhabi and announced commercial deals between American and Emirati interests totaling over $200 billion. The tiny kingdom’s diplomatic profile is outsize. There is also a bilateral “AI Acceleration Partnership,” plans for a vast data center in the UAE, and UAE access to advanced American microchips and AI infrastructure. At the same time, the Trump organization announced that its UAE business now includes development of a $1 billion, 80-story Trump International Hotel and Tower, to include the world’s highest outdoor pool. With apartments already said to be selling for $20 million each, it will nicely complement the Trump International Golf Club in Dubai, opened during the first Trump term.
Since becoming president again, Trump’s net worth, now estimated at $7.3 billion, has nearly doubled thanks to the crypto enterprise. It makes the Biden family influence-peddling business — which we appropriately spent so much time examining while were Democrats obfuscating — look like chump change. Now, it’s Republicans who don’t want to talk about family businesses. As for Democrats, if they retake the House at noon on January 3, 2027, I’d expect them to have the impeachment machinery humming by sundown.
I won’t further belabor the record with more calls to repeal the pardon power. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) I’ll just reiterate that the “autopen presidency” is another pardon power scandal. It’s just that, for some reason, we don’t seem to be calling it that.
