For President Donald Trump, the “biggest political scandal” in American history isn’t Watergate. Neither is it the Teapot Dome scandal of the early 1920s or the Reagan Administration’s Iran-Contra Affair.
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To him, short of the 2020 election he claims was stolen from him, the most scandalous thing to ever happen in U.S. politics is a machine that copies signatures.
An autopen is at the heart of a political witch hunt that Trump launched against his predecessor, Joe Biden. In June, Trump ordered an investigation into Biden and his aides—the latter of whom he claims abused the former President’s signature and used it “across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.” Among the signed decisions Trump cast doubt on was Biden’s high-profile pardons and commutations, as well as presidential appointments. Trump also claimed the machine’s extensive use concealed Biden’s “serious cognitive decline.”
Biden has strongly denied the allegations, calling Trump and his team “liars.”
Speaking to the New York Times on July 10, Biden asserted that he “made every decision” on clemency matters and authorized his staff to use his presidential autopen because “there were a lot of people.”
“The autopen is, you know, is legal,” he told the Times. “As you know, other Presidents used it, including Trump.”
Read More: Trump Orders Investigation Into Biden and His Aides. Here’s What to Know
But Trump has not let go of the autopen controversy.
Speaking at the White House on Monday, he once again said it is “maybe one of the biggest scandals that we’ve had in 50-100 years… I guarantee you: he [Biden] knew nothing about what he was signing.”
Trump also said Biden misused the automaton, arguing it should be reserved for niceties instead of important documents. “That’s what the autopen’s supposed to be—to write to a young 7-year-old boy,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be for signing major legislation and all of the things.”
The autopen is the latest item of fascination for Republicans questioning Biden’s cognitive status, particularly during the last few months of his term—in an apparent goal to invalidate some of the former President’s signed decisions.
Rep. James Comer (R, Ky.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, has led a probe into Biden’s supposed “mental decline and use of autopen,” and has subpoenaed those in Biden’s orbit. (NBC News reported that Comer’s digital signature was used in letters and subpoenas in connection to the probe.)
A history of replicated signatures
The story of autopens and signature reproduction dates back to 1803, when John Isaac Hawkins received a patent for his invention which he called the “polygraph,” a machine that duplicates handwriting. Thomas Jefferson is said to be the first President to use an early version of a machine that would copy what he wrote in real-time. He had raving reviews of it, writing in one letter: “The use of the polygraph has spoiled me for the old copying press, the copies of which are hardly ever legible… I could not, now therefore, live without the Polygraph.”
Using an autopen used to be a discretionary affair, though it is often referred to as one of Washington’s “worst-kept secrets.” Harry Truman is believed to be the first U.S. President to use what we now know as an autopen. Gerald Ford acknowledged its function, with White House staff using the machines to reproduce signatures on photographs and letters.
Over time, the signing machine became more visible to the public eye: Lyndon B. Johnson was the first President to be photographed using the autopen. Those photos appeared in 1968 in the National Enquirer with the headline “The Robot that Sits in for the President.”
In a 1989 Los Angeles Times article, presidential autograph collector Paul K. Carr of Rockville, Md., reported on how various Presidents used autopens. Carr ranked Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as among those Commanders-in-Chief who have issued the most different autopenned signatures.
But it was in 2005 under George W. Bush that legal analysis for the President’s use of the autopen emerged. At Bush’s request, the Justice Department issued a memorandum opinion, and said 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. Rather, the President may sign a bill within the meaning of Article I, Section 7 by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.” Bush eventually did not use proxies for signing bills.
Six years later, Barack Obama made history as the first President to sign legislation into law using the autopen: affixing his signature through the White House Staff Secretary to a last-minute extension of the Patriot Act while he was in France for the G8 Summit. Several House Republicans penned a letter asking Obama to refrain from the practice, saying that none of his predecessors used an autopen to sign bills into law.
Later that year, Obama continued using the autopen, this time in Bali, Indonesia, for an appropriations bill. In 2013, Obama used the autopen again to sign the fiscal cliff bill while he was in Hawaii for vacation.
Read More: Why Trump Can’t ‘Void’ Biden’s Pardons Because of Autopen
What we know about Biden’s and Trump’s autopen use
According to emails obtained by the New York Times, Biden made four sets of clemency actions recorded with an autopen—one set which included preemptive pardons for his family. The autopen was used “in all, on 25 pardon and commutation warrants from last December to January.” TIME has not reviewed these emails.
The emails reportedly confirmed that it was former White House Staff Secretary Stefanie Feldman who managed Biden’s autopen, and needed written accounts of Biden’s oral instructions in meetings before its use.
Before turning over the presidency to Trump, Biden met with his senior aides. After the meeting, per the Times, then-White House Chief of Staff Jeffrey Zients on Jan. 19 wrote an email to the meeting participants that read: “I approve the use of the autopen for the execution of all of the following pardons.”
Trump and his team have been pressed about what evidence they have about Biden not signing off on the clemency actions. Harrison Fields, the principal deputy press secretary of the White House, told The National News Desk that “the truth will come out about who was, in fact, running the country, sooner or later.”
Trump himself, however, has downplayed his own use of the autopen.
When asked in March about whether he used it, he said: “Yes, only for very unimportant papers… I’ll sign them whenever I can, but when I can’t, I, you know, would use an autopen. But to use them for what they’ve used it for is terrible.”