The Heritage Foundation and MAGA media laid the groundwork for President Donald Trump’s unprecedented and lawless overnight claim that he is invalidating the pardons President Joe Biden issued to the January 6 House select committee.

Trump cited the committee, particularly its co-chair, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), in the calls for retribution against his foes that were a hallmark of his 2024 presidential campaign. In response, Biden issued preemptive pardons to the committee’s members and staff in the final hours of his presidency. 

“Rather than accept accountability, those who perpetrated the January 6th attack have taken every opportunity to undermine and intimidate those who participated in the Select Committee in an attempt to rewrite history, erase the stain of January 6th for partisan gain, and seek revenge, including by threatening criminal prosecutions,” Biden said in his statement on the pardons.

Trump responded hours later by proving Biden correct, promising “action” for the “J6 hostages” while denouncing Biden’s pardons of the “Unselect Committee of political thugs,” who he claimed had been “very, very guilty of very bad crimes.” 

He moved quickly to fulfill his promise to the January 6 defendants. Later that day, he granted clemency to “all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection” with their actions that day — handing out pardons to people convicted of having violently assaulted law enforcement and commuting to time served the sentences of those imprisoned for participating in seditious conspiracies. 

But Trump waited until after midnight on Monday to reopen his attack on the January 6 committee. The president posted on Truth Social — immediately after praising the golfer he said he had defeated to win his golf club’s championship — that Biden’s pardons for January 6 committee were “hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen.” 

Trump continued, in a deranged rant in which he claimed without evidence that Biden “knew nothing about” the pardons, that the members were “subject to investigation at the highest level”: 

In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them! The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime. Therefore, those on the Unselect Committee, who destroyed and deleted ALL evidence obtained during their two year Witch Hunt of me, and many other innocent people, should fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level. The fact is, they were probably responsible for the Documents that were signed on their behalf without the knowledge or consent of the Worst President in the History of our Country, Crooked Joe Biden!

That’s not how any of this works, as NBC News made clear in its report on Trump’s posting:

However, the U.S. Constitution makes clear the president has unique executive powers to issue pardons and makes no provision for subsequent presidents to rescind them — for issues relating to the choice of pen or anything else.

Biden and President Barack Obama both used an autopen device to sign official documents, a practice which is legally binding, according to 2005 guidance from the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, commissioned by President George W. Bush.

“The President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law,” the office said, adding that this includes the use of an autopen.

But Trump’s allies have spent the last few weeks creating the pretext for Trump to take such an action against his perceived political enemies, and now the president is adopting their argument. His supporters are primed to accept an investigation if the zealots Trump appointed to lead the Justice Department and FBI move forward.

Trump’s MAGA allies built his case that Biden’s pardons were void

The Heritage Foundation, a MAGA think tank that created the Project 2025 framework undergirding much of Trump’s administration, launched the autopen critique with a March 6 post from its OversightPR account on X (formerly Twitter).

“We gathered every document we could find with Biden's signature over the course of his presidency,” the account stated. “All used the same autopen signature except for the the announcement that the former President was dropping out of the race last year.”

Trump’s media allies jumped on the report and immediately began suggesting that Biden’s January 6 committee pardons might be invalid.  

“There is nobody who wants to move past this Joe Biden autopen scandal than Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Gen Milley,” MAGA influencer Rogan O'Handley wrote under his X handle DC_Draino. “If courts start to rule Biden's signatures are invalid, then those federal pardons go out the window."

By March 10, the narrative jumped to Fox News. 

“A Heritage Foundation report called the Oversight Project has dug up many of the documents signed — actually signed during the Biden presidency,” Laura Ingraham told contributor Raymond Arroyo on her show that night. “And they report, I guess, that all but one was signed by autopen. Or maybe he was just busy.”

Arroyo replied that “considering that he seemed to be on autopilot for most of his presidency, this is not hard to believe.” He later suggested that pardons signed by autopen might be “null and void,” adding, “You know who's sweating the most tonight? Liz Cheney and the Bidens. This is not a happy night for them.” 

On Jesse Watters Primetime the following hour, Trump counselor Alina Habba picked up the story. She said that Biden “evidently signed everything with an auto signature” and, when Watters later suggested Biden “should have handed out more preemptive pardons” to prevent Trump’s DOJ from investigating his political foes, she suggested that Biden’s pardons were void.

“I wonder if those were auto-signed as well, because I would challenge the validity of it. You never know,” she said.

Heritage President Kevin Roberts joined Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt the same night to claim that the autopen usage proved Biden was “incapacitated” and called into question the legitimacy of documents like “the pardons that President Biden made to people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and other terrible Americans.”

The following day, Heritage’s OversightPR account responded to the spate of interest with an update on Biden’s pardons:

We analyzed Biden's Jan. 19, 2025 “pardons” for:

-Biden Family Members

-Anthony Fauci

-General Milley

-J6 Committee

-Gerald Lundergan

They all have the same exact Biden autopen signature

The post triggered more MAGA media coverage.

Newsmax’s Greg Kelly cited the Heritage report on his March 13 show, saying that it raises “questions about the validity of these pardons.”

A few days later, the president himself agreed.