00:00You've brought up AutoPen. What was the AutoPen used to sign for documents, to your knowledge, as Staff Secretary?
00:10You mean what categories of documents?
00:12What categories of documents?
00:13Yes, so there's broadly kind of two categories of documents. One is letters. There's tens of thousands of letters, maybe hundreds of thousands of letters that the AutoPen is used for.
00:29And then there are particular executive actions of the president that some range from exceedingly pro forma, but still require a signature.
00:42Commissions, for example, it has been, as I understood from Dave Kalba, the established practice of administrations for at least 50 years that commissioned officer signatures would be AutoPen.
00:56Sometimes presidents AutoPen them, very rarely. And then there's all kinds of executive actions for the president. So that can be, for example, a continuation of national emergency.
01:11Like to step back whether you continue sanctions on a company and a country that is under sanctions.
01:18So every year, a continuation of national emergency is, well, every year sanctions have to be reupped, reauthorized by the president under the power of the national emergencies.
01:35So, you know, might not be the biggest decision of whether the president was going to reupped Iran sanctions, but we needed to have a decision from the president to do that.
01:50So that's the kind of thing that we would have decision memos around. There are a lot of those. So there's a lot of decision memos around that. And then from executive actions to the president.
02:02And then we had decisions that didn't, that would retain, would pertain to a regulation or a policy process, which didn't require an AutoPen signature with respect to the latter category, the president's ability to do the job.
02:18You expressed confidence in Joe Biden's ability to execute the duties of the presidency. Is that a fair summary? Yes.
02:27And the president's performance in the 2024 presidential debate did not change your view. Is that right? Yes.
02:37Was it ever your view at any time that President Biden was unable to make decisions about matters within the scope of his presidential duties?
02:46No, it was not.
02:47I should just declare, I never had a view that he could not exercise the duties of his office or that he was not in command of the presidency.
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