Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Associated Press
Joe Biden has always kept a tight circle. Only a few could ever claim to be his right-hand man. There was Ted Kaufman, the early campaign volunteer who became Biden’s senatorial chief of staff; John DiEleuterio, the college friend who went to work as his state director in Wilmington. Plus Jill Biden, of course, and Joe’s sister, Valerie, his right-hand women.
Less remarked upon, over the decades, are the dozens of us who have served in a related but different capacity: as uncredited stand-ins for Joe Biden’s literal right hand via autopen.
Last week, the Heritage Foundation released a (since disputed) report claiming that the Biden White House used an autopen to sign preemptive pardons during its final days. These included, allegedly, the pardons granted to members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack. On Friday, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social with a dark suspicion: “The person who was the real President during the Biden years was the person who controlled the Autopen!” That figure, he’d go on to intimate without evidence, was not Biden, who was too checked out; in Trump’s view, this made Biden’s pardons null and void.
From there, it seems, we’ve entered a now-familiar cycle: First, Trumpland makes a claim about Biden’s executive functioning or lack thereof; Biden sources then deny the claim. But then, too, a few anonymous “Biden sources” reportedly go rogue to hint that perhaps there’s something there: in this case, that a “a key aide to the then-president may have made unilateral determinations on what to auto-sign.” A few months after that — we’re not there yet with the autopen — perhaps a former administration staffer echoes those hints on a podcast, or a panel, setting themselves up for a turncoat book deal down the road.
Instead, I’m willing to break my silence.
In 2006, I began a summer internship in then-Senator Biden’s Delaware headquarters. A 16-year-old politics nerd from Wilmington and a foreign-policy buff, I was awed by Biden’s stature as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations committee. I was welcomed by DiEleuterio — a lovely man — and the front-desk admin gave me a tour. The grandest room in the suite was Biden’s office; he wasn’t in that week, she said, but he might be later in the summer, in which case we’d meet. The work was menial: logging calls, opening mail. But most days contained at least one moment of magic: the autopen.
On the desk, in a back room, the device looked charmingly analog. There was no screen, no “interface”: You’d just load a pen or Sharpie into the loop at the end of its arm and let it trace its way. On my end, it took — well, not skill, but care to line the paper up below. Or misalign: I decided that the signature oughtn’t run too parallel to the bottom edge of the page; there should be a gentle, friendly skew. Once engaged, the device would move slowly — at an uncanny human pace — along the ghostly path of Joe’s right hand. The slash of his J, the curves of his B, a jagged e that shocked me every time: These are the strokes I’ll never forget.
Then, Joe’s final coup de grace, this little dot he’d add above the last few letters of his surname. Ostensibly meant to crown the i but falling chicly behind, it reminded me of Marilyn Monroe’s beauty mark.
When I think back to the work that I did on the autopen that summer, it was all pretty anodyne stuff. There were wedding congratulations and birthday wishes, those kinds of salutations: nice messages that people might want to frame someday as a family heirloom. That’s why we signed them in Sharpie.
Was there more than that? Perhaps some polite letters addressed to government agencies on Delawareans’ behalf? Maybe, but you didn’t hear it from me.
These past few days have been hard. Yes, I agree with all the legal experts out there, who say that the Biden administration’s autopen use stands as perfectly legal and sound. But at the same time, when I see the New York Post call Joe Biden “Autopen Joe,” I get this pang of guilt because … well, that’s how I think of him, too; like that’s how I best know Joe.
I never did meet the senator that summer. He never showed, either, at the “Joe Biden high-school youth day” I once attended down in Dover. And I’ve never quite managed to catch him since.
Am I upset by this? Surprised? No: Biden has rarely been the kind of omnipresent, glad-handing politician you might expect a small state to produce. And on a personal level, we Delawareans understand why his clan turned inward after the 1972 death of his first wife and daughter. But in addition to that, there’s a cultural aspect, the way that “Delawareness” has long been characterized by negations and evasions: our good little corporate secrecy haven, neither North nor South.
I do wonder, though: Did the rest of the country know to expect such a ghost? Did they know to read Biden’s presidency as that of a quintessential “Delaware Man,” shot through with blankness? People expected more expansiveness of vision from his presidency, and boldness, too, but he always had this institutionalist streak. He is a company man from the Company State, accustomed to tracing preset paths, like choosing to run for a second term in the first place. He could be called worse than Autopen Joe.
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