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Was President Joe Biden aware of who he was pardoning in the final days of his presidency? Or were White House staffers behind the unprecedented string of autopen signings?

In recent weeks, evidence has been mounting that the former president may not have been in the loop, which is, to be charitable, problematic.

Luckily for us, the folks at NBC News jumped into action with a story headlined, "Lead investigator into Biden's use of an autopen signed letters with a digital signature."

In it, reporters Ryan Nobles and Melanie Zanona make an inane equivalence between lead investigator Rep. James Comer signing PDFs using a digital signature -- a completely legal thing to do -- and Biden allegedly allowing his staff to issue blanket presidential pardons for thousands of people without knowing the names or crimes of the recipients.

As anyone who works in an office can tell you, one of these instances is done for practical reasons. Unless you print, sign and rescan every single letter you send, the only way to sign a PDF is to use a digital signature. The other signature was used to administer an awesome plenary constitutional power used by the president, and only the president.

It's not just NBC News. Rather than investigating a possibly immense political scandal, many in the media pedantically focused on the "autopens."

It's not the impersonal nature of the digital signing that's the real problem. It's that the impersonal nature of the autopen may have allowed staffers to hijack a constitutional power because the president probably didn't know what year it was. A story that the legacy media covered up. Does anyone believe Comer was unaware of what the letters he sent entailed?

"Republicans alleging that Biden's occasional use of an 'autopen' to sign documents -- a practice other presidents have done as well -- demonstrated that he wasn't fully in control or aware of what his administration was doing," NBC News writes.

No, they are alleging that Biden had no idea what was going on because we now have a catalog of documented events in which the former president was clearly incapable of performing the most rudimentary tasks of his position. That is why he withdrew from the 2024 presidential race. Hadn't we all moved on from pretending otherwise?

Every pardon, autopen or not, must have the consent of the president. Biden granted clemency and pardons to over 1,500 people in one day. He told The New York Times this week that he "made every decision" on his own. But former White House officials have already stated that the pardons were in such large batches and were based on "broad categories" that reviewing each case was impossible. Emails show that then-White House chief of staff Jeff Zients approved the autopen use.

Now, anyone who's spent five minutes in Washington understands what happened here. Democrats sent NBC News the story to deflect from the scandal, and helpful reporters puffed it up with pseudojournalistic lingo and close-ups of Comer's signature to create the illusion of a big scoop. This process has been repeated endlessly over the past decade.

We already know that the White House's pardon and clemency signing are corrupt. Biden preemptively handed out 10-year blanket pardons to his family, who profited in the millions from influence-peddling schemes. He also created a dangerous precedent by preemptively blanket pardoning allegedly innocent political allies such as Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney.

Still, it seems unlikely that there will be any legal repercussions for the autopen scandal. Presidents are empowered to delegate signatures by autopen to classes of criminals if they desire. Considering what happened in the White House, it is likely that aides would have guided Biden's fragile hand into signing 8,000 pardons personally, if needed. That doesn't mean the public doesn't deserve a full accounting of what went on in the White House.

We already know that the legacy media hadn't really "missed" Joe Biden's inability to perform the most rudimentary presidential duties. Most of them were participating in the cover-up. They still are.

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David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books -- the most recent, "The Rise of Blue Anon," available now. His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on X @davidharsanyi.

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