Comer demands Biden senior staffers sit for interviews over autopen investigation

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer on Wednesday sent letters to President Joe Biden's senior advisors, demanding that they sit for interviews as part of an ongoing investigation into the use of an autopen for presidential pardons.

Comer sent letters to former Senior Advisor to the President Michael Donilon, former Senior Advisor to the President for Communications Anita Dunn, former Chief of Staff Ron Klain, former Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Bruce Reed, and former Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti.

“The American people deserve full transparency and the House Oversight Committee is conducting a thorough investigation to provide answers and accountability," Comer said in a press release. "The cover-up of President Biden’s mental decline is one of the greatest scandals in our nation’s history."

"These five former senior advisors were eyewitnesses to President Biden’s condition and operations within the Biden White House," he added. "They must appear before the House Oversight Committee and provide truthful answers about President Biden’s cognitive state and who was calling the shots."

Speaking on the "John Solomon Reports" podcast on Wednesday, the Oversight Project's Kyle Brosnan highlighted the implications of Biden's use of an auto pen amid reports of his declining mental health.

"So we've been looking at President Biden, or the Biden White House's use of an auto pen to sign official presidential documents for a few months here, and our investigation is really over the last couple of weeks and months here has focused in on two types of documents: pardons and actual clemency, and then executive orders on the pardons," he said.

"The Biden White House issued 51 warrants to either pardon or commute the prison sentence of about 4200 people, and of that, we found that 32 of those warrants were signed with an auto pen, which meaning the President didn't hand sign those documents himself," he added. "And that's important, because the power of the pardon rests only with the President of the United States."

"And if you know that the President signed it by signing it by hand, you know he is exercising that power. And when you have an auto pen signature, as we do, on over half of the clemency warrants that we analyzed here, it begs and leads to a whole bunch of questions as to what the President is exercising the power solely delegated to him in the Constitution," Brosnan added. "And so we're continuing to dig we put out something yesterday showing that a number of the clemency warrants were auto pen while the President was in Washington, DC."