WASHINGTON — President Biden’s sweeping clemency grants during his final days in office caused concern inside the West Wing and Justice Department about how to ensure his wishes were accurately implemented — and it’s unclear whether Biden himself was consulted before thousands of pardons were announced, internal emails obtained exclusively by The Post show.
The messages indicate the 46th president orally approved commutations for inmates jailed for crack cocaine offenses on Jan. 11 — but his auto-penned signature wasn’t affixed to three documents listing about 2,500 recipients until the morning of Jan. 17.
The debate over who exactly to include in the mass pardons and how to modify their sentences came to a head late on the night of Jan. 16.
Then-White House Staff Secretary Stef Feldman, a key gatekeeper of the presidential autopen, wrote to West Wing lawyers she needed evidence Biden had consented before she authorized a mechanical signature on one of the most sweeping acts of clemency in American history.
“I’m going to need email from [Deputy Assistant to the President] Rosa [Po] on original chain confirming P[resident] signs off on the specific documents when they are ready,” Feldman wrote to five other Biden aides at 9:16 p.m.
Six minutes later, deputy White House counsel Tyeesha Dixon, one of the email recipients, forwarded the message to Michael Posada, chief of staff to the White House counsel’s office.
“Michael, thoughts on how to handle this?” Dixon asked, adding in reference to the documents authorizing clemency: “He doesn’t review the warrants.”
“Ok talked to Stef,” Posada replied to Dixon at 10:06 p.m.
“We will just need something from Rosa once the documents are ready confirming that the 21 people commuted to home confinement are who the president signed off on in the document titled X, and the # individuals listed in document titled Y are those with crack powder disparities who the president intended to commute,” he wrote.
“Basically, something from Rosa making clear that the documents accurately reflect his decision. If you can give me a blurb whenever they are ready to suggest to Rosa, I can pass along.”
The mass clemency was announced hours later, at 4:59 a.m.
The exchange took place well outside of Biden’s known regular working schedule — with White House aides leaking to media outlets months earlier that the Democrat was at his best between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on any given day.
Po had indicated in a prior email that Biden told multiple officials on Jan. 11 he wanted to “commute the sentences of those with crack-powder sentencing disparities who were determined by DOJ not to have a high likelihood of recidivism as determined by standards set by the First Step Act.”
It’s unclear whether Biden actually gave the final go-ahead as Feldman requested Jan. 16, but the emails suggest that aides instead incorporated Po’s attestation of what he “intended” to do.
Three separate clemency warrant documents grouped the inmates impacted by the clemency grant, with most due to be released this past February and others having their sentences shortened but not entirely curtailed.
The ex-president’s public remarks since then indicate he was not aware that only three documents were required for the roughly 2,500 commutations.
He told the New York Times in July that autopen was used to sign clemency warrants “because there were a lot of them.”
In December 2024, Biden issued a similar mercy grant to about 1,500 people who had been released on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic, an action requiring just a single signed document.
Presidential approval for the specific documents authorizing clemency matters, in part, because some grantees were not given full commutations.
Some more serious offenders had their sentences shortened, but not completely set aside. The most restrictive category, for example, listed 19 people who had their sentences reduced to 350 months behind bars, equivalent to more than 29 years.
However, there were surprising aberrations in which violent criminals were included in the near-immediate clemency grants — including Russell McIntosh, 51, whose crimes included the 1999 murder of a North Carolina woman who threatened to report him to police and her two-year-old child.
The documents reviewed by The Post do not show that aides countermanded Biden’s wishes, but provide additional context and names of officials involved in interpreting the then-president’s will — amid ongoing reviews by the House Oversight Committee and the Justice Department.
‘Can you write it in first person’
Legal experts say that auto-signed documents hold full legal force, but must accurately reflect the president’s orders, and the emails obtained by The Post indicate attempts to create a paper trail vouching for just that.
On Dec. 20, 2024, Dixon and associate counsel Jared English discussed via email how to authorize the autopen’s use for Biden’s commutation of 37 federal death row inmates’ sentences to life in prison.
“Tyeesha, before Staff Sec will agree to affix P’s signature to the warrants, they need someone (probably [White House Counsel] Ed [Siskel]) to send them an email confirming that P agreed to the commutations, the number of commutations, and the date,” English wrote to Dixon. “I’ve drafted an email for Ed below. can you please get confirmation from Ed today that the email can be sent to Staff sec?”
That draft statement claimed that Siskel “got POTUS’s verbal approval on the following decisions during a [Date] decisional meeting wiht PORUS [sic], Jeff Zients and Bruce Reed [any (sic) anyone else in the room]: 1. P approved the commutations of the sentence of [37] individuals on death row.”
Dixon wrote back: “Can you write it in first person from Ed (Stef usually requires that) and include that the commutation is to life without release?”
The commutations were announced on Dec. 23.
‘We do not know how to interpret’
The emails also indicate Justice Department confusion on how to carry out Biden’s orders — with the department not receiving names of the roughly 2,500 affected inmates from the White House until after the public announcement and then quibbling with the content of the files.
DOJ veterans expressed concerns about the fact that some of the commutation recipients were violent criminals — and also raised questions about whether the wording of one of three of Biden’s clemency warrants rendered the grants null and void.
That document said offenders were having their punishments reduced for “offenses described to the Department of Justice,” without any specifics.
DOJ official Elysa Wan wrote to Dixon, English and White House associate counsel DeAnna Evans on the evening of Jan. 17: “We do not know how to interpret ‘offenses described to the Department of Justice.’ Could you please clarify?”
Then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer wrote to Dixon and Evans on Jan. 18 that he too was concerned about the vague wording of the clemency warrants impacting dozens of more serious cases.
“I think the language ‘offenses described to the Department of Justice’ in the warrant is highly problematic and in order to resolve its meaning appropriately, and consistent with the President’s intent, we will need a statement or direction from the President as to how to interpret the language,” he wrote in an email previously reported by The Post.
The result of that vagueness could be that “[b]ecause no offenses have been described to the Department from the President, the commutations do not take effect… . I have no idea what interpretation the incoming Administration will give to the warrant, but they may find this interpretation attractive.”
He requested “a statement of direction from the President as to the meaning of the warrant language.”
It’s unclear whether the Biden White House aides, who had mostly boxed up their offices by that time, ever replied.
President Trump has routinely attacked his predecessor’s use of an autopen, but he has not taken concrete actions to reverse the effect of any particular document. Some Biden alums have privately speculated that peers may have exceeded their authority in authorizing the autopen.
“‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ might be a funny movie, but the president not being in control of the White House is a horror,” a Trump White House official told The Post.
“The American public deserves to know how Joe Biden’s staff were actually in the driver’s seat.”
Following publication of this article, a former Biden White House staffer familiar with the pardon process insisted: “President Biden made the decisions.”
“There is a concerted and willful blindness by Republicans when it comes to understanding how broad-based pardons work when they were issued by President Biden,” this person added, “that doesn’t exist when it comes to understanding the broad pardons issued under Trump for January 6 insurrectionists.”
