He Said He Made Every Decision Himself.
House Investigators Found an Autopen and 14 Depositions That Say Otherwise.
“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” President Biden told a CNN town hall in July 2021. Nine days later, federal data showed 74 percent of a Massachusetts outbreak were fully vaccinated.
That overstatement turned out to be the smallest of the pattern. From the pardon he signed hours before leaving office, to the autopen investigators say a staffer — not Biden — authorized, to the laptop his own campaign called Russian disinformation, this is the documented record of what the Biden White House said publicly and what its own aides now admit under oath.
- 74% share of a July 2021 Massachusetts COVID outbreak that was fully vaccinated, nine days after Biden's town hall claim — CDC / CNBC
- 14 depositions underlying the House Oversight Committee's October 2025 'Biden Autopen Presidency' report — House Oversight Committee
- 51 intelligence officials signed the October 2020 letter calling the Hunter Biden laptop 'Russian disinformation' — later authenticated — The Hill
At a CNN town hall in Cincinnati on July 21, 2021, President Biden (D) told the audience flatly: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” He added that vaccinated people would not be hospitalized, would not be in the ICU, and would not die. PolitiFact rated the claim “Half True” the next day, finding he had exaggerated vaccine effectiveness — breakthrough infections were rare but already documented.
The data arrived fast. On July 30, 2021 — nine days later — the CDC published its Provincetown, Massachusetts outbreak study: of roughly 469 cases tied to July 4th gatherings, 74% were fully vaccinated. That single study helped drive the CDC’s reversal to recommend indoor masking for vaccinated people in high-transmission areas. The administration’s policy kept moving in the other direction anyway: Biden signed Executive Order 14042 on September 9, 2021, mandating vaccination for federal contractor employees with a December 8 compliance deadline, and a companion CMS rule mandated it for healthcare workers — both issued after the breakthrough data was already public.
“You're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
President Joe Biden (D) · CNN town hall, Mount St. Joseph University, Cincinnati · July 21, 2021
The Supreme Court split the mandates apart on January 13, 2022: a 6-3 majority struck down OSHA’s large-employer vaccine-or-test rule in NFIB v. OSHA, while a 5-4 majority upheld the CMS healthcare-worker mandate in Biden v. Missouri. Two mandates, built on the same public confidence Biden’s July claim was meant to project, resolved in opposite directions the same day.
On January 20, 2025, hours before leaving office, Biden issued preemptive pardons to Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, and members of the House January 6 committee — covering any federal offense they “may have committed” from 2014 to 2025. “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment…of wrongdoing,” the White House statement read. Republicans, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), read it the opposite way — as an implicit admission of the guilt the pardon claimed not to acknowledge.
Nine months later, the question shifted from whether the pardons were justified to whether Biden signed them at all. On October 28, 2025, the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY), released “The Biden Autopen Presidency: Decline, Delusion, and Deception in the White House” — a report built on 14 depositions finding that then-Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, not Biden personally, emailed approval for the autopen to execute the pardon batch that included Fauci’s, per reporting from The New York Times relayed by Fox News and the Washington Examiner. The committee “deems void” every autopen-signed action lacking “proper, corresponding, contemporaneous, written approval traceable to the president’s own consent,” and referred the matter to the Justice Department. Trump-appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed her office is reviewing it.
The 'Pardons' that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen.
Trump's first public response to the pardons, months before the House Oversight Committee's own autopen investigation began.
Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect.
Posted the same month the House Oversight Committee released its autopen report.
Biden has denied the entire premise. “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency,” he said in response to the report. “I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.” That denial is now the central dispute the Justice Department review will have to weigh — against 14 depositions and an email trail his own former chief of staff generated.
The autopen questions didn’t start in October 2025. Special Counsel Robert Hur, closing his classified-documents investigation on February 8, 2024, declined to charge Biden but wrote he would present to a jury as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — a line the White House counsel’s office had asked him to soften before release. Hur told the House Judiciary Committee weeks later, under oath, “I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the President unfairly.”
“Original Sin,” the May 2025 book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson, went further — describing a small circle of aides, including Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, and Anita Dunn, alongside body-adjacent staff Anthony Bernal, Annie Tomasini, and Ashley Williams, managing what the public saw of the president’s condition. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed that inner circle. On July 16, 2025, Bernal — chief of staff to First Lady Jill Biden — pleaded the Fifth Amendment rather than answer whether any unelected official exercised presidential duties or whether Biden ever told him to lie about his health. Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, was deposed on June 27, 2025.
No court or independent body has found that Biden was incapable of exercising presidential authority, and Biden himself disputes the entire framing. The Fifth Amendment pleas by his aides are not evidence of any specific wrongdoing — they are a legal choice available to any witness. What is documented: Hur’s on-the-record memory assessment, the book’s named sourcing, and the Oversight Committee’s finding that a staffer, not Biden, authorized at least one autopen-signed pardon batch by email.
The pattern goes back further. When the New York Post published emails from a laptop tied to Hunter Biden on October 14, 2020, Twitter and Facebook throttled the story and Twitter locked the Post’s account entirely. Five days later, 51 former intelligence officials, organized in part by ex-CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, signed a public letter saying the story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” — while conceding they had no direct evidence. Morell later told Congress he wrote the letter to give the Biden campaign a debate “talking point.”
It worked. At the final 2020 presidential debate on October 22, Biden told the country: “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant…What he’s saying is a bunch of garbage.” By March 2022, the Washington Post and New York Times had authenticated emails from the laptop through cryptographic signatures; NBC, CNN, and CBS News followed later that year. The laptop was real. The “Russian plant” framing that shaped the final weeks of a presidential campaign was not.
“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he's accusing me of is a Russian plant... What he's saying is a bunch of garbage.”
Joe Biden (D) · final 2020 presidential debate · October 22, 2020
Executive actions taken by White House Biden staff & signed by autopen are NULL AND VOID. Our report reveals how key aides colluded to mislead the public and the extraordinary measures they took to sustain the appearance of presidential authority as Biden's capacity to function independently diminished.
Hunter Biden's infamous laptop confirmed in New York Times report
Not every thread in Biden’s record resolved this cleanly. As vice president, Biden pushed for the 2016 firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin while his son Hunter sat on the board of Burisma Holdings, the energy company Shokin had at points investigated. Biden himself boasted about the pressure campaign in 2018. Whether Shokin was fired to protect Burisma or because Western allies broadly viewed him as too lax on corruption generally remains genuinely disputed — RFE/RL’s own reporting lays out both sides. The House GOP’s nine-month impeachment inquiry into the Biden family’s business dealings closed in August 2024 without recommending impeachment articles. Biden was never charged with a crime connected to any of it.
What is settled is narrower than the rhetoric on either side, and still substantial: a vaccine claim the CDC’s own data contradicted within nine days, a pardon batch a House committee says a staffer — not the president — authorized by email, a special counsel’s on-the-record memory assessment, aides who chose the Fifth Amendment over answering questions about the president’s condition, and a laptop story his own campaign and 51 former officials called Russian disinformation before two of the country’s biggest newsrooms authenticated it.
Four separate episodes, four years apart, share one shape: a confident public claim, and a paper trail that surfaced later saying something else. The vaccine promise lasted nine days before the CDC’s own data undercut it. The laptop took twenty months to go from “Russian plant” to authenticated. The autopen took nine months to go from pardon to a House committee saying a staffer, not the president, signed off. Biden denies the throughline. The depositions, the emails, and the dated public record are what a reader gets to weigh against that denial.
