A Last-Second Biden Pardon Hints at Who Wielded the WH Auto Pen

Obscure illegal alien activist had a big-money monolith backing him all the way.

by Joe Schaeffer | Mar 11, 2025 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

As AutopenGate threatens to raise grave questions about the final days of the Joe Biden presidency, a last-second pardon issued to a pro-illegal alien activist seems to provide revealing clues about just who was running the White House.

“There are profound reasons to suspect that Biden’s staff and political allies exploited his mental decline to issue purported presidential orders without his knowing approval,” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey wrote in an explosive March 4 letter to Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.

“Bailey’s primary concern … is that, shortly before leaving office, Biden granted a great many pardons or commutations for violent criminals,” Liberty Nation News’s Graham Noble noted.

Conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation has reported that the autopen was ubiquitous in Biden’s White House. “We gathered every document we could find with Biden’s signature over the course of his presidency,” Heritage’s Oversight Project stated. “All used the same autopen signature except for the announcement that the former president was dropping out of the race last year.”

Road Map to a Biden Pardon?

Ravi Ragbir is not a violent criminal. But his pardon in the final moments of the Biden administration is a window into something far larger than himself. Ragbir is wholly plugged into a big-money machine funding radical social causes that critics have long contended wielded inordinate sway over Democrat policymaking during the Barack Obama and Joe Biden presidencies.

He was going to be deported because of his criminal past. “Ragbir, a US green card holder who moved from Trinidad, faced legal troubles after a 2001 mortgage fraud conviction,” The Gothamist reported in January. “His role as executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City brought him national attention, especially following [President Donald] Trump’s election in 2016. In 2018, his detention during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in at the Federal Building in Lower Manhattan led to street protests, with 18 of his supporters arrested outside. “

More on that street agitation theater below. As we will see, it was far from organic.

Ragbir co-founded the New Sanctuary Coalition in 2007, one year after an immigration judge had ordered that he be deported. “Ragbir has been seeking ever since to vacate his felony conviction,” leftist media outlet Religion News Service reported in January days before the surprising Biden pardon was issued.

This was a priority to someone, but whom?

“Pardoning Mr. Ragbir sends an important message about the constitutional legitimacy of his advocacy and the illegitimacy of targeting immigrants like him based on their criticism of government policy,” Ramya Krishnan, senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute, gushed after hearing of the pardon.

The institute was directly involved in defending Ragbir as he faced deportation.

“In 2018, the Knight Institute, Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP), and the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center filed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Ragbir, arguing that the US government’s retaliation against him and other immigrant-rights activists violated the First Amendment,” the organization stated.

Who are they?

The Knight First Amendment Institute “was established in 2016 by Columbia University and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation,” its website states. The Knight Foundation, which dates to 1940, is yet another lavishly endowed philanthropy founded in the first half of the last century by wealthy conservative businessmen that has been hijacked and repurposed to serve a leftist cultural agenda today. The Ford Foundation, created by Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford’s son Edsel in 1936, and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, started by the devoutly Catholic founder of the Hilton hotel chain in 1944, are two classic examples.

As of the end of 2023, the Knight Foundation had assets totaling more than $2 billion. Ragbir had some powerful allies in his corner during his uphill fight to remain in America.

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Among other donors to the Knight Institute are numerous familiar names in the world of high-dollar progressive “philanthropy,” including Arnold Ventures, the Ford Foundation, dark money activist network the Media Democracy Fund, the Omidyar Group (left-wing eBay founder Pierre Omidyar), and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

The New Sanctuary Coalition does not list any financial statements on its website, but a search of the Ford Foundation’s grant history shows it has donated at least $350,000 to the organization since 2018.

Bankrolling Street Protests

It is crucial to note that there is nothing grassroots about Ragbir’s work on behalf of illegal aliens. It’s all made possible by the leftist big-money spider web. City Journal in 2019 published an investigative report on New York taxpayer funding for leftist activist organizations that shows how it works.

The article featured a group called Make the Road New York, which “receives about $9 million annually,” author Seth Barron wrote. Make the Road Action in turn financially supported other leftist groups.

Your News – How You Like It!

“New York Communities for Change, the successor organization to the disgraced Acorn, also receives money from Make the Road,” Barron related. Make the Road founders Andrew Friedman and Oona Chatterjee “spun off a larger national organization, the Center for Popular Democracy, which receives millions of dollars in donations from the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, organized labor, and the Rockefeller Foundation – and which operates from the same street address as Make the Road Action, with which it shares overlapping leadership,” Barron stated.

When ICE took Ragbir into custody to be deported in 2018, “New York’s social-justice protest complex swung into action,” the article continued. “Make the Road [and other leftist groups] issued immediate calls for action, and protesters, including elected officials, caused a melee on lower Broadway, blocking emergency vehicles.”

This is the power structure driving the Democratic Party today. Could this be the hand that controlled the White House auto signature pen for four full years? Perhaps a cognitively impaired Joe Biden had no say in the matter at all.

~

Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

Read More From Joe Schaeffer Political Columnist

Null and Void?

If President Biden didn’t comprehend what he was doing, are his laws, orders and regs valid? 

Paul Driessen

Laws in every state govern wills and the transfer of estates and property upon a testator’s death. For example, Virginia statutes provide that “any individual may make a will,” except testators who are unemancipated minors or “of unsound mind.”

Unsound mind generally means not having mastery of one’s mental faculties, which could include being enfeebled enough that the testator is easily subject to improper influence by others, especially someone who would benefit from provisions of the will.

Virginia law considers someone to be of unsound mind if his or her cognitive capacity is totally impaired, meaning the person is incapable of acting rationally or understanding conversations, instructions or decisions. In other jurisdictions, impairment may not have to be “total.” Wills executed by such persons are rendered invalid, null and void.

How might these guidelines apply in other circumstances – decisions by President Biden, for instance?

Joe Biden’s declining mental and physical capabilities were apparent to many even before his election and inauguration. His Delaware basement campaign, to avoid awkward encounters with reporters and citizens, raised many questions. During his presidency, family, White House staff, legacy media, Democrats in Congress and others worked hard to hide, obfuscate, defend and excuse his infirmities, even as they became harder to deny.

Millions wondered just when President Biden became cognitively incapable of leading the United States and Free World. His inability became so obvious during the June 2024 Biden-Trump debate that Democrat Party leaders pushed the 46th president out of the race. But what about before that?

An article published shortly before President Trump’s 2025 inauguration revealed that House Speaker Mike Johnson knew Mr. Biden was no longer “in charge” of the White House, presidency or country long before his cognitive incapacities were finally acknowledged by those whose jobs, prestige or political agendas depended on him being “the best Biden ever.”

During a January 2024 Oval Office meeting with President Biden, the Speaker particularly wanted to discuss a Biden Executive Order that blocked liquefied natural gas exports to Europe. Russia’s war with Ukraine, the likelihood of renewed European dependence on Russian gas if US LNG exports were terminated, and the extent that would enrich Putin’s war machine made this a serious national security issue. Johnson wanted to know WHY Biden had signed the EO just weeks earlier.

“I didn’t do that,” Biden insisted. But in fact, he had.

Johnson suggested that Biden’s staff print the EO, so that the two of them could read it together. Biden finally, but vaguely, acknowledged signing the order. But as PJ Media columnist Matt Margolis noted, it soon “became evident that the President had no grasp” of actually having signed the EO, or of the implications of having done so. 

“I thought, we’re in serious trouble. Who is running the country?” Margolis quoted Johnson. “I don't know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know,” either, Johnson added.

“This exchange underscores a chilling reality,” Margolis wrote. We had a president who not only was “struggling to remember critical decisions” but was also “unable to engage fully in high-stakes discussions with national security implications.” Biden was clearly “not fully in charge.”

When did that incapacity actually set in? And what does that imply for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of executive actions, regulatory sign-offs and presidential signatures enacting legislation into law?

Are they still valid? Or have some (or many) been rendered null and void, because President Biden was no longer in control of his mental faculties? Or because he was enfeebled enough that he was subject to improper influence by staffers who were pursuing agendas even more radical than the president would have agreed to, had he actually been “in charge,” including staffers who might benefit from certain presidential decisions?

Executive Orders can be reversed by EOs signed by a successor president. President Trump did that with a flurry of signatures during his first week in office. Formal rulemakings must go through a more lengthy  and thorough process but can still be undone or rewritten by another administration.

That will certainly be the case with the Obama EPA’s “Endangerment Finding,” declaring that plant-fertilizing, planetary-life-giving carbon dioxide “endangers human health and welfare.”

However, the Biden Administration promulgated 3,248 final rules and regulations – a record 107,262 Federal Register pages. They reflect President Biden’s determination to exert federal control over nearly every aspect of climate change, “equity and social justice,” economic and environmental issues, and our daily lives – including “efficiency” rules for cars, stoves, dishwashers, furnaces and water heaters.

Many of these rulemakings will undoubtedly be examined and reversed under the Congressional Review Act. Others will fall outside its purview and require more than Trump Executive Orders.

And what about Biden’s pardons, many of them murderers and hardened criminals; others convicted offenders like his son; still others people who haven’t yet been charged or convicted of crimes but were given preemptive pardons, in case prosecutors later decide no one should be above the law?

Still more complicated will be legislation, such as the multi-trillion-dollar, pork-laden, Green-New-Deal-subsidizing Inflation Reduction Act, the $1-trillion infrastructure law, the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and many others signed by Mr. Biden.  

If they merit revision or recission, must Congress and President Trump go through an entire legislative process – and overcome almost certain Democrat “resistance” – to change or cancel them?

Or do some of these Biden Era laws (and regulations and pardons) fall within the parameters of a wills and estates “unsound mind” analog? If so, at what point was President Biden too cognitively impaired to know what he was agreeing to or signing? Who makes that determination, and on what basis?

It’s definitely a case of first impression, and the outcomes are far from easy, ensured or predictable. But it’s also another way for President Trump and Republicans to reexamine extreme Biden Era decisions.

I went to law school, was licensed in two states, practiced mostly legislative and regulatory law, even wrote a couple of Supreme Court briefs. But mostly I’ve been a policy wonk – pondering, developing, promoting, opposing, and implementing or rejecting public policies.

The Biden cognitive issue reminds me of humorist Will Rogers’ answer to the threat of World War I German U-boats that were savaging Allied shipping. Rogers proposed that the US Navy “heat the Atlantic Ocean to the boiling point. Then, when the ocean gets too hot for them German subs to stay underwater, they’ll have to come to the surface” and we can “pick ‘em off one by one.”

Of course, he averred, some admirals were likely to ask how they were supposed to boil the ocean. Rogers had an answer. “I leave that to the technicians. Myself, I’m a policy man.”

Like Will Rogers, I’m just presenting policy ideas. It’s up to President Trump, Congress, courts and neuropsychologists to figure out how to implement them.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.

Presidential Pardons

By Robin Itzler

Editor's Note:  This is one of the commentaries selected from Robin's weekly newsletter Patriot Neighbors. Any cartoons appearing will have been added by me.  If you wish to get the full edition, E-mail her at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com to get on her list, it's free. RK

Jimmy Carter pardoned over 200,000+ when you consider draft dodgers. On his first full day in office, Carter issued Executive Order 11967 to pardon those Americans who “violated the Military Selective Service Act by draft-evasion acts or omissions committed between August 4, 1964 and March 28, 1973.” 

But those were nameless people. Overall, most presidents have taken their power to issue pardons very seriously. Until there was Joe Biden. Joe Biden has pardoned thousands of people. Who knows what the final number will be?  Joey treats pardons the way Hunter treats his out-of-wedlock child. 

Starting with JFK, here’s how many pardons were issued by presidents: 

1. John F. Kennedy, 575 
2. H. W. Bush, 77 
3. Lyndon Johnson, 1,187 
4. Bill Clinton, 459 
5. Richard Nixon, 926 
6. George W. Bush, 200 
7.  Gerald Ford, 409 
8. Barack Obama, 1,927 
9. Jimmy Carter, 566 
10. Donald Trump, 237 
11. Ronald Reagan, 406 
12. Joe Biden thousands & climbing 
13. Trump Pardons or Commutes ALL J6 Political Prisoners

Difference between Pardons and Commutations: Pardons overturn federal convictions, exempt people from punishment and restore rights such as being allowed to vote, run for public office, hold professional licenses and own a gun. They do not erase the record of the conviction. Commutations reduce sentences; the convictions remain intact.  

• Video Resurfaces of Adam Schiff Saying Innocent People Don’t Get Preemptive Pardons, He Received a Preemptive Pardon Today, but no pardon for Mayorkas or Garland

"The Most Lawless Administration in History"

“Never forget that while Hunter was selling access to the ‘big guy,’ Joe Biden’s administration sent SWAT teams to the homes of pro-lifers; recruited spies in Catholic parishes; treated parents as domestic terrorists; and prosecuted Trump. The most lawless administration in history.” —Republican Senator Josh Hawley, Missouri

By Robin Itzler

Editor's Note:  This is one of the commentaries selected from Robin's weekly newsletter Patriot Neighbors. Any cartoons appearing will have been added by me.  If you wish to get the full edition, E-mail her at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com to get on her list, it's free. RK

Bonhoeffer, hero killed in last days of the war.  

In early 1945, even as Third Reich cities became mountains of rubble and Germany knew the war was lost, the sole focus for many Nazis was killing Jews and those Christians who opposed Nazism.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Protestant theologian who stood up against the Nazis, was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945. The Nazis who killed Bonhoeffer knew Germany was days or weeks away from surrendering. They still killed him. Germany surrendered less than one month later on May 7.

Bonhoeffer, who was arrested in 1943 and spent two years in prison, ministered to other prisoners and wrote letters. “Letters and Papers from Prison” was posthumously published and stands as a testament to Bonhoeffer’s faith in Jesus and his commitment to stopping the Nazi Third Reich.

Are there similarities to the Biden-Harris administration’s fanatical focus TODAY on arresting Americans who were in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021?

J6ers are still being arrested.  

With less than 35 days before Donald Trump triumphantly returns to the White House, the misnamed Justice Department continues arresting Americans related to January 6, 2021. Patriot attorneys keep asking judges to delay trials until after the inauguration. The leftist judges refuse. Attorney General Merrick Garland proudly boasts that the January 6 investigation is the biggest Justice Department investigation.

In “Nearly 4 Years Later, No Letup in Jan. 6 Prosecutions, Possible Pardons or Not,” RealClear Investigative Reporter Julie Kelly writes:

“In what Attorney General Merrick Garland describes as the biggest criminal investigation in Department of Justice history, more than 1,560 people have been charged for federal crimes never before used against political protesters, including under a post-Enron obstruction statute overturned by the Supreme Court in June. At least 1,000 of these defendants have been convicted – either at trial or by accepting plea offers – with some 650 defendants ordered to serve time in a federal prison. Sentences range from a few days in jail to up to 22 years as the DOJ seeks “terror enhancements” to tack on additional time.”

Kelly points out that the Department of Justice has a 100 percent J6 trials conviction rate. Since the trials first started in D.C. in March 2022, not one J6 defendant has been fully acquitted of all charges.

Under Nazi rule, Jews and Christians like Bonhoeffer had the same chance for a fair trial that J6ers have in D.C. Nazi leadership would be very proud of Merrick Garland’s Justice Department.

« President Trump must pardon and commute the sentences of ALL the J6ers on Day One! «

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin Pardons Parent Arrested at Loudoun County School Board Meeting

Elaine Mallon10 Sep 20235

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) granted an absolute pardon to a father arrested at a school board meeting for coming to his daughter’s defense after she was reportedly raped in the school bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt.  During a Loudoun County School Board meeting in June 2021, Scott Smith was arrested and charged and later found guilty of obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct when he started to swear at a community member threatening to spread false and malicious information about his business, the Daily Wire reported. His daughter was just about to share on a megaphone about how, just weeks before, she was sexually assaulted in a school bathroom, which the school board had allegedly attempted to cover up..............To Read More...

My Take - This was an outrage, and the ones who should have been arrested were the members of the school board, and truthfully, that's true all over the nation.  Kudos to the Governor.  

Trump Weighs in on Whether Matt Gaetz Asked Him For a Pardon

Katie Pavlich Apr 07, 2021

President Donald Trump is denying a report in the New York Times that Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, who is currently under federal investigation, asked him for a preemptive pardon. “Congressman Matt Gaetz has never asked me for a pardon.  It must also be remembered that he has totally denied the accusations against him," Trump released in a statement Wednesday.   Gaetz is allegedly under investigation for an inappropriate relationship with an underage girl. He denies the accusations and defended himself in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner earlier this week.......To Read More..

My Take - And the NYT just keeps rolling along....wrong, inaccurate, corrupt and since they've such a massive history of being wrong, inaccurate and corrupt, it's not a stretch to think they're most likely deliberately lying about this also. Another good reason for SCOTUS to readdress The New York Times v. Sullivan decision.   

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz’s Accused Extorter Confirms Asking for $25 Million, Denies Extortion - Nate Church 7 Apr 2021 - Former Air Force intelligence turned consultant Bob Kent admitted Monday he asked Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz for $25 million, but denies accusations of extortion.  During a Monday interview on SiriusXM’s The Michael Smerconish Program, one of the men Gaetz has accused of using an investigation into alleged liaisons with underage girls as the basis for extortion said that while he did ask for the money, it was to be part of a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Kent claims he approached Matt Gaetz with information leading Kent to believe that missing and presumed dead FBI agent Robert Levinson was still alive and suggested the embattled representative would have profited politically from helping to rescue Levinson. “Matt Gaetz is in need of good publicity, and I’m in need of $25 million to rescue Robert Levinson,” Kent told Smerconish. Kent also painted a very different picture of the conversation involved, going so far as to suggest extortion was addressed directly when he spoke to Gaetz’ father, Don............

Trump Pardons Set an Example For Biden Himself

Editorial of The New York Sun | December 24, 2020

“Nauseating” is the word the Washington Post is using this morning to describe the pardons and commutations that President Trump issued as Christmas approached. The Times exclaims that, by pardoning “some of the most deplorable people in the country,” Mr. Trump has “made a mockery of mercy.” It even lists among the undeserving of Mr. Trump’s pardons the Thanksgiving turkey.

Yet the Times takes the occasion to call for yet more pardons. Good for the Gray Lady, we say. She references 74 Federalist, the number of the Federalist papers in which Hamilton sketches why the Founders granted the pardon power to the President alone. Without “an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.”

This is why Hamilton, in 74 Federalist, avers that the “benign prerogative of pardoning” is to be “as little as possible fettered or embarrassed.” It strikes us that the pardon of Paul Manafort, which so agitates the Times and the Post, is an example of what the Founders anticipated. It’s hard to recall a case in which the motives of the prosecution were so bluntly questioned as in Mr. Manafort’s case.

That questioning was done by the judge himself, the Honorable (and venerable) T.S. Ellis III. He went so far as to suggest from the bench and in open court that the government’s reason for prosecuting Mr. Manafort was to force him to “sing” against President Trump. It was shocking to us that, after such a suggestion, the judge shrank from dismissing the case. It is sad that it was left to President Trump to step up................To Read More.....

Sen. Flake Denounced Trump’s Pardon of Sheriff Arpaio—But Applauds Obama’s Pardon of Cuban Terrorist/Spies

"Regarding the Arpaio pardon, I would have preferred that the President honor the judicial process and let it take its course,”  Jeff Flake on Twitter. 

Humberto Fontova Posted: Sep 02, 2017

Well, this very judicial process also convicted a Cuban terrorist/spy named Gerardo Hernandez for –among other crimes--conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens. The judicial process so revered by Jeff Flake then sentenced the Cuban terrorist to two consecutive life terms. In fact, these convictions were upheld all the way to the Supreme Court.  Yet Sen. Jeff Flake was a gleeful accessory to Obama’s pardon (by any other name) of this communist spy/murderer/terrorist and his release back to Cuba as a conquering hero........To Read More....