Justice Department officials were left trying to sort out the scope of some of former President Joe Biden’s end-of-term clemency decisions after thousands of pardons and commutations were announced outside the department’s traditional review process, according to internal government emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
The records, obtained by government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust and provided to Fox News Digital, show officials seeking clarification about individual commutations, correcting an erroneous notice involving Hunter Biden’s pardon and acknowledging that many of the administration’s final clemency cases had not been vetted through the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.
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The emails provide an inside look at the administrative challenges surrounding an extraordinary burst of clemency during Biden’s final weeks in office.
Fox News was first to report on the records.
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One of the clearest examples surfaced after Biden announced on Jan. 17, 2025, that he was commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses.
Biden said at the time that the action was intended primarily to benefit prisoners serving sentences that were substantially longer than they would likely receive under contemporary federal sentencing laws, including people affected by the former disparity between crack and powder cocaine penalties and older sentencing enhancements. Federal records show the Jan. 17 action ultimately covered 2,490 people.
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But internal correspondence shows that Justice Department personnel encountered questions almost immediately about precisely which sentences were covered.
On Jan. 28, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Maya Song of the Eastern District of Virginia contacted the pardon office regarding Christopher Damon Spencer, whose name appeared on Biden’s clemency list in connection with a 2003 criminal case.
Spencer also had a separate 2011 case in which he received a 235-month federal prison sentence, and prosecutors wanted to know whether Biden intended to commute that sentence as well, Fox noted.
Deputy Pardon Attorney Kira Gillespie responded that applying the commutation to both cases appeared to be the “most sensible reading” of the president’s action.
She also acknowledged a broader problem with the information available to the office.
“Many of the cases that were granted commutation on January 17 were not vetted through our office,” Gillespie wrote, adding that the available data had not received the level of review the office would ordinarily seek.
That admission is significant because the Office of the Pardon Attorney traditionally plays a central advisory role in federal clemency cases.
“The process didn’t match the public sales pitch,” former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares told Fox News Digital.
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“There is a Grand Canyon gap between the public description and the internal reality,” Miyares said.
“This paints a troubling picture of a pardon process driven by politics and haste rather than the careful deliberation such extraordinary acts of executive clemency demand,” added PPT’s communications director Alexa Moutevelis.
“The Justice Department pardon office’s own emails show the final Biden auto-pen blitz was so clumsy and rushed that the chaos extended even to the most high-profile and controversial of all: his own son, Hunter,” Moutevelis told Fox.
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Meanwhile, a year ago, the top artificial intelligence authority from the Trump administration stated on Tuesday that he has identified a Democratic U.S. senator who allegedly “controlled” the White House’s use of the autopen.
David Sacks, who serves as President Donald Trump’s AI advisor, told Fox News host Jesse Watters that he believes his investigation will reveal that one of the Senate’s most progressive voices is responsible for applying Biden’s artificial signature to numerous executive orders.
“Elizabeth Warren controlled the autopen during that administration,” said the Trump advisor, adding that the Massachusetts senator has a “pathological hatred of the crypto community” and wanted to “drive this community offshore.”
Sacks did not explain why he believes Warren was behind the widespread use of Biden’s autopen.
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However, among Biden’s final acts in office were pardons granted to members of the contentious January 6 select committee, including former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.
President Trump has challenged the validity of these pardons, alleging that they were signed using an autopen rather than by hand, and perhaps without Biden’s knowledge.
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
