Trump immediately gets bad news from attorney over illegal order - Brian Tyler Cohen

[TexasTowelie]

Democracy Watch episode 272: Marc Elias drops bad news on Trump after he tried to veto Biden's pardons.

Cohen: Auto pens have been used for about 15 years now. I believe the first instance of an autopen was used by Barack Obama back in 2011 and so can you just speak to the legitimacy of the broader claim that uh unless something is signed exactly by someone's hand that it doesn't have uh kind of legal authority behind it?

Elias: Yeah, so first of all I don't want to concede the factual predicate here that as far as I can tell there's no evidence for correct Uh which is that that somehow an autopen was used. Okay, so like let's just set that aside. The fact is that George W Bush uh the
Republican president before Barack Obama actually sought exactly this question in the form of an advisory opinion from the
Office of Special Counsel which is the part of the Department of Justice that issues opinions to the executive branch on on complex or novel uh legal and constitutional questions and they issued an opinion in 2005 that said that auto pens are legal for presidential
signatures, that as long as the president uh has has decided that the autopen should be used the autopen is just fine.

[mwmisses4289]

1. Actually, Thomas Jefferson used one of

first autopen type device during his presidency.