On Thursday evening, Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) called for access to sealed records related to President Biden’s autopen usage following a key admission by former White House official Neera Tanden.
Tanden, who previously served as Director of the Domestic Policy Council, testified under oath before the House Oversight Committee in a closed-door session on Tuesday, revealing that she was authorized to operate President Biden’s autopen from October 2021 through May 2023.
Her testimony comes amid mounting scrutiny from House Oversight Chairman James Comer, who has identified five Biden aides allegedly involved in concealing concerns about the president’s mental fitness and the broader controversy surrounding use of the autopen.
According to the Washington Examiner, Tanden testified that she was authorized to direct the use of President Biden’s autopen but denied any manipulation or misuse of the tool. Tanden also acknowledged that she sometimes employed the autopen without directly confirming with President Biden that the action had been personally authorized. Based on Tanden’s Tuesday testimony, she was likely behind the Biden autopen pardons while Joe Biden was golfing in the US Virgin Islands.
Schmitt said he is now demanding to obtain sealed Biden autopen records. “I just took a first-of-its-kind act on the Biden autopen coverup. Using my authority as Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, I have submitted a ‘special access request’ to Archivist Marco Rubio to obtain sealed documents. It may blow this whole thing open,” he wrote in an X thread (Rubio is fulfilling the role of Archivist while serving as secretary of state and President Trump’s national security adviser).
“I previewed this action this morning. The Biden mental decline coverup was one of the most damning scandals in U.S. history,” Schmitt added. “A key priority of mine is to make sure that something like this will never happen again. The only way to do that is to figure out what went wrong and who was running the country. With the requested documents, the subcommittee can begin work on crafting a solution.” He added on Fox Business: “This is a bigger scandal than Watergate.”
PLAY: