There is a robot in Washington that signs the president’s name It’s been a tool of convenience for many administrations. How did the autopen become a ‘SCANDAL’?

As a freshman intern in the office of Senator Ted Kennedy, on August 29, 1974, my first job was to use the autopen to sign letters from Senator Kennedy. Thanks to civil rights historian David Nolan for sharing article. https://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2024/08/feast-of-saint-augustine-august-28-1974.html 

There is a robot in Washington that signs the president’s name

It’s been a tool of convenience for many administrations. How did the autopen become a ‘SCANDAL’?

Yesterday at 8:30 a.m. EDT

10 min

(Illustration by Anna Lefkowitz/The Washington Post; iStock)

By Kara Voght

In a White House full of high-level officials with high-level-official responsibilities, Jack Shock had something special.

“I had pen power.”

The contraption, roughly the size of a drafting table, had its own room. Shock would choose from one of three Clinton signatures, taking care to vary which signature was used for repeat presidential letter-getters. A staffer would position the letter, then fire up the machine. “You had to press both of your knees on the lever, almost like a spinning wheel,” Shock says. A mechanical arm appeared, holding Clinton’s preferred autograph utensil: a Sharpie.

B-i-l-l-C-l-i-n-t-o-n — dot the i, dot the other i, cross the t.

During the George H.W. Bush presidency, Jim Cicconi, a deputy chief of staff, was in charge of the autopen — the only person in the West Wing with permission to use it “for all matters,” according to a 1989 memo. “Everything had to go through me,” Cicconi says. Bush mainly used the device to sign personalized correspondence, like birthday greetings and Christmas cards. Yes to books Bush wrote or biographies about him; no to magazine covers. And the 41st president always wanted to sign commissions, legislation and executive orders himself.

Much of Cicconi’s responsibility was in the maintenance. The pens — hand, auto, or otherwise — can’t be ordinary; the National Archives insists the ink be of archival quality so they don’t fade. Matrices — grooved pieces of plexiglass that controlled the pen’s movements — were closely monitored for wear and tear; a shaky signature was the sign that one needed to be replaced.

What did it feel like, to have pen power?

Cicconi: “If you made a mistake, there was a real sense you’d get in trouble.”

Shock: “It seems like it would have been a lark. The reality is it was a lot of pressure.” The pen, after all, “could write checks or declare war,” he added.

You might have heard of the autopen recently.

“With the exception of the RIGGED PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020, THE AUTOPEN IS THE BIGGEST POLITICAL SCANDAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY!!!” President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social last month.

Several inanimate objects have drawn Donald Trump’s ire over the years: showerheads (“You know I have this gorgeous head of hair — when I take a shower, I want water to pour down on me”), paper straws (“These things don’t work”), LED lights (“The light’s no good — I always look orange”). But perhaps no artifact has attracted his ire like the autopen. Specifically, Joe Biden’s autopen.

It has been a Trump bugbear since March, when an arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation issued a report, “The Autopen Presidency,” suggesting Biden relied extensively on an autopen for his presidential proclamations. Those proclamations included preemptive pardons for people whom Trump and his allies had cast as villains, such as Anthony S. Fauci and the members of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol (which concluded, in its final report, that Trump “purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 Presidential election to aid his effort to overturn the election and for purposes of soliciting contributions”).

Trump has since floated the idea that those pardons should be nullified, suggesting that Biden “didn’t know anything about them.” Biden, meanwhile, has forcefully pushed back on any insinuation that he cluelessly had allowed his staff to wield an autopen on his behalf. When asked for comment, a Biden spokesperson shared the former president’s statement from June: “I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”

How presidents use the autopen to sign documents

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It's been a tool of convenience for presidents and lawmakers alike, the autopen is widely used across federal offices. (Video: The Washington Post)

The White House Counsel’s office has just begun reviewing tens of thousands of emails about clemency decisions Biden signed via autopen in the final weeks of his administration. Senate Republicans have promised to launch an investigation, and House Republicans already have; Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), the House Oversight Committee chair, subpoenaed senior officials of Biden’s administration to ask about who authorized the use of the autopen. Comer signed those subpoena notices with a digital signature, NBC News reported, a common practice among federal lawmakers, who also often have autopens.

So, all that’s happening. But let’s talk more about the president’s autopen, because you probably have a bunch more questions about it.

Such as: Can we see it?

“We used to say the autopen was second-most guarded thing in the White House, save for the president,” Shock says.

What we do know is that today’s autopens are much smaller than their predecessors, closer to the size of a toaster oven. And unlike the matrices that directed the mechanical stylus of Clinton’s autopen, many of today’s machines scribble digitally preprogrammed signatures with their robotic arms.

So, we haven’t seen the Trump autopen. We asked the White House if they’d share a photo with us; none was provided, but an official confirmed that it’s in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

“I never use it,” Trump told reporters in March.

“I mean, we may use it, as an example, to send some young person a letter, because it’s nice.”

President Donald Trump personally signs an executive order in April. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

Right, so, letters are the main reason presidential administrations have depended on autopens for the past eight decades. Harry Truman is thought to be the first president to use a modern autopen. John F. Kennedy’s dependence on the autopen inspired a book, “The Robot That Helped to Make a President,” though his administration was loath to admit its use. (He had several different programmed signatures: “John F. Kennedy” for business, “Jack Kennedy” for pleasure.) His successor, however, had no such qualms: Lyndon B. Johnson allowed the National Enquirer to feature his autopen for a 1968 article titled “The Robot That Sits In For the President.”

Such as: Can we see it?

“We used to say the autopen was second-most guarded thing in the White House, save for the president,” Shock says.

What we do know is that today’s autopens are much smaller than their predecessors, closer to the size of a toaster oven. And unlike the matrices that directed the mechanical stylus of Clinton’s autopen, many of today’s machines scribble digitally preprogrammed signatures with their robotic arms.

So, we haven’t seen the Trump autopen. We asked the White House if they’d share a photo with us; none was provided, but an official confirmed that it’s in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

“I never use it,” Trump told reporters in March.

“I mean, we may use it, as an example, to send some young person a letter, because it’s nice.”

President Donald Trump personally signs an executive order in April. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

Right, so, letters are the main reason presidential administrations have depended on autopens for the past eight decades. Harry Truman is thought to be the first president to use a modern autopen. John F. Kennedy’s dependence on the autopen inspired a book, “The Robot That Helped to Make a President,” though his administration was loath to admit its use. (He had several different programmed signatures: “John F. Kennedy” for business, “Jack Kennedy” for pleasure.) His successor, however, had no such qualms: Lyndon B. Johnson allowed the National Enquirer to feature his autopen for a 1968 article titled “The Robot That Sits In For the President.”

It almost seems as if autopens should have nicknames. Do they?

Shock: “It did not, that I know of.” (Unless “the pen” counts.)

Cicconi: “Not that I ever heard.”

Drat. But also, it makes sense that officials wouldn’t try to personify the autopen, since it’s supposed be an extension of the president.

Here’s a fun autopen fact: In Shock’s day, if, say, the president was on Air Force One while his autopen was signing a letter in his name back at the White House, “FROM ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE” would be added to the heading — “just to note that he wasn’t in the facility that day and no one’s trying to pull anything or sign it in his absence,” says the former aide. “It had to reflect where he was, even if it was getting autopenned.”

Another question: Can the autopen sign bigger-ticket documents? Can a president use it to sign a bill into law?

Yes, according to 2005 guidance from George W. Bush’s Department of Justice, which states that the commander in chief “need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves,” but could ask a “subordinate” to sign a bill “for example by autopen.” (Barack Obama was the first president to do this, using an autopen to sign legislation extending the Patriot Act, which was set to expire while he was in France at the G8 summit in 2011. Biden used his autopen to sign legislation in 2024 to extend funds for the Federal Aviation Administration for a week as Congress finalized passage of its longer-term funding bill.)

But also — maybe he can’t, according to Tom Graves, a former Republican congressman from Georgia. In 2011, Graves cautioned that Obama was setting a “dangerous precedent” and pointed to legal opinions that cut against the Justice Department’s guidance. He’s been watching the current autopen fracas unfold with amusement from his lobbying firm on Capitol Hill.

“It’s funny — I’ve received notes, handwritten notes, from people, about my calling it to question in the very beginning and appreciation for that,” says the former lawmaker. He still thinks how and when an autopen is used is “a really important topic to get to the bottom and to resolve,” whether through congressional or judicial action. He thinks the questions about Biden’s alleged use of the autopen for proclamations (such as pardons) are worthwhile. “I personally don’t think there’s a problem with the actual signer activating the autopen,” Graves says. “But I do think there’s a responsibility to read the document and sign off on the document. Assigning it to someone else — that’s the questionable area here.”

Canadian entrepreneur Matthew Gibson has been watching the present autopen controversy with interest from his perch on Lake Erie’s Pelee Island. Two decades ago, Gibson teamed up with author Margaret Atwood to design the LongPen, a product that allowed the author to virtually attend book signings and remotely render her signature in real time. It captures a “biometric” signature, with all of the pressure and cadence of real-time penmanship, imparting a humanity the autopen lacks.

“With the autopen, there’s a disconnect between intention and action,” Gibson says. “Using this would dispel any dialogue that’s happening right now — it wouldn’t be a discussion.” (He says he’s written to a few U.S. lawmakers about his product, though he won’t say to whom.)

The people least impressed by autopens may be the collectors. “They have little to no value,” says Sandra Palomino, the director of historical manuscripts at Heritage Auctions, of autopenned signatures, adding that they aren’t typically auctioned off as stand-alone items.

But there is one autopen-like device historians consider valuable. On the third floor of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, up the escalator from Clara Barton’s Red Cross wagon and down the hall from Grover Cleveland’s inauguration overcoat, sits Thomas Jefferson’s polygraph — a sort of proto-autopen. It’s a polished wooden box, roughly the size and shape of a backgammon board, with a pair of arachnid-like mechanical arms, each attached to a pen nib.

Jefferson used it to make copies of his writings; as he wrote with one pen, the mechanical arm would render an exact copy on a second sheet of paper. It is a deeply unsexy artifact in a display case full of them, tucked in a corner beside Bill Clinton’s 2001 presidential budget and a washing machine patent signed by Andrew Jackson. No tourists pause to look at as they rush toward Abraham Lincoln’s top hat.

But its significance was not lost on Jefferson — who, in a letter penned during his own presidency, called the contraption the “finest invention of the present age.”

CORRECTION

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that President Joe Biden pardoned himself before leaving office. He pardoned members of his family.

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What readers are saying

The comments largely dismiss the notion of the autopen being a scandal, suggesting it is a distraction or deflection tactic by the Trump administration. Many commenters argue that the real issue is whether a president understands and approves the documents they sign, regardless... Show more

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