High-ranking Biden administration officials repeatedly questioned and criticized how the president's team decided on controversial pardons and allowed the frequent use of an autopen to sign measures late in his term, internal emails obtained by Axios show.

• Why it matters: The messages are the latest signs of the chaos surrounding the 82-year-old former president during the final weeks of his administration, in two areas that are now being investigated by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee, Axios' Alex Thompson reports.

President Trump has cited Biden's process in issuing pardons to try to justify many of his own controversial pardons or commutations on behalf of donor-connected supporters and others who were imprisoned for trying to overturn the 2020 election.

👀 How it happened: After the political backlash to President Biden pardoning his son Hunter last Dec. 1, the White House began pushing to find more people to grant clemency to, according to people familiar with the internal dynamics.

• "There was a mad dash to find groups of people that he could then pardon — and then they largely didn't run it by the Justice Department to vet them," a person familiar with the process told Axios.

Biden granted clemency to more people than any president in U.S. history — 4,245 people. More than 95% of those actions occurred in the final 3½ months of his presidency, according to Pew Research.

• Many of those actions, including pardoning other members of his family on his last day in office, were signed using an autopen — a computerized version of the president's signature that didn't require him to physically sign the document.

🔎 The intrigue: Biden's pardon of his family members went through a unique process.

• Near the beginning of his presidency in 2021, incoming staff secretary Jess Hertz wrote a memo to Biden, citing precedent from the Obama administration to argue his original signature should still be used for "pardon letters."
• By 2025, Biden had opted for the autopen to pardon five members of his family — including his brother and sister, who had been accused of leveraging the Biden family name for financial benefit.

An email from Biden's chief of staff, Jeff Zients, at 10:31 p.m. the night of Jan. 19 — less than 14 hours before Biden was to leave office — confirmed the use of the presidential autopen for those pardons.

• The order came from Zients' email address, but he didn't personally send it. Zients' aide Rosa Po, who had access to Zients' email account, wrote and sent the authorization of the president's autopen to senior White House officials on Zients' behalf.

Zients, Po and Hertz didn't respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Biden declined to comment.

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Several senior Justice Department officials raised objections about the clemency process with the White House Counsel's office, which was led by Ed Siskel, Axios' Alex Thompson reports.

• Siskel helped steer the clemency process in the administration's final months and did not respond to a request for comment.

On Jan. 17, just three days before leaving office, Biden granted 2,490 commutations — the most ever by a president on a single day. Biden said they were for people "convicted of nonviolent drug offenses who are serving disproportionately long sentences."

• Biden boasted: "With this action, I have now issued more individual pardons and commutations than any president in U.S. history."

📝 The next day, senior Justice Department ethics attorney Bradley Weinsheimer penned a scathing memo stating that calling the clemency recipients nonviolent was "untrue, or at least misleading."

• He listed some of those with violent crime records to whom Biden had given clemency — including a man who had pleaded guilty to charges related to murder after killing a woman and her 2-year-old daughter, after the mother threatened to reveal his drug-dealing business to law enforcement.

Weinsheimer said the DOJ had marked the man as "problematic," but Biden commuted his sentence anyway. "I have no idea if the president was aware of these backgrounds when making clemency decisions," Weinsheimer wrote.

• The New York Post first reported details of Weinsheimer's memo, along with other emails.

💬 Asked about the process for clemency, Biden told The New York Times in July: "I made every decision."

• Biden said he used the autopen only for the thousands of commutations and pardons because "we're talking about a whole lot of people."
• That explanation is undermined by records that indicate Biden only had to sign a few documents for every large group of people he granted clemency.

Zoom out: Internally, some senior Biden White House officials pushed back on the frequent requests to use the autopen.

• Biden White House staff secretary Stef Feldman, who was in charge of the West Wing paper flow, repeatedly asked for more details and confirmation of the president's intentions with the autopen — including when it came to clemency, according to several emails Axios obtained.
• On Jan. 16, when told to use the autopen to commute several cases related to crack-cocaine sentences, Feldman wrote back: "I'm going to need email from [Rosa Po] on original chain confirming [Biden] signs off on the specific documents when they are ready."

👀 What's next: The House Oversight Committee is to interview Zients on Sept. 18 about Biden's use of the autopen.

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America's blue-collar workforce is shrinking, as President Trump's policies hit the same sectors he vowed to reinvigorate, Axios' Courtenay Brown reports.

• Why it matters: Hiring is stalling out nearly across the board amid drastic shifts in trade and immigration policies. But perhaps nowhere is it more apparent than in the labor sectors that expected a Trump-era boost.

📉 By the numbers: The labor market's summer hiring drought was particularly painful for industrial parts of the economy.

• The "manufacturing recession" — underway for years — got uglier. The sector lost 12,000 jobs in August, the fourth consecutive month of shrinking employment. The industry had 78,000 fewer workers last month, relative to the same period a year ago.
• Construction shed jobs for the third straight month. Wholesale trade — a sector that includes transportation, warehouse staff and material handlers — has lost 32,000 workers since May.

On the demand side: Tariffs raise the cost of foreign-made inputs needed to assemble goods. That might crimp demand, which might force manufacturers to slash workers.

• "We've implemented our second price increase," an electric equipment manufacturer said in the Institute for Supply Management's monthly survey, released this week. "'Made in the USA' has become even more difficult due to tariffs on many components. ... In two rounds of layoffs, we have let go of about 15 percent of our U.S. workforce."

On the supply side: Even if employers have the appetite to bring on staff, they can't hire workers who are not available.

• The immigration crackdown is impacting sectors that rely more heavily on those workers.

👓 What to watch: "Manufacturing and construction tend to be the first sectors hit when the economy slows, so the blue-collar downturn serves as a warning for the rest of the labor market unless things improve soon," economic data analyst Joey Politano, who writes the Apricitas Economics newsletter, tells Axios.

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With a dinner for GOP lawmakers, President Trump last night inaugurated the Rose Garden Club — his Mar-a-Lago-esque dining patio in the newly paved Rose Garden.

• The president held a microphone as he addressed about 100 people — mostly House Republicans, along with some GOP senators, AP reports.

"We call it the Rose Garden Club," Trump said. "And it's a club for senators, for congresspeople and for people in Washington — and, frankly, people that can bring peace and success to our country."

New signs at the Pentagon proclaim Pete Hegseth "Secretary of War" yesterday, as Trump ordered the Department of Defense to be renamed the Department of War — reverting to a title it held until 1949 (76 years ago).

• Officials made the change after World War II to emphasize preventing conflict.

"I think it sends a message of victory ... a message of strength," Trump said.

• The executive order restores "Department of War" as a "secondary title for the Department of Defense." (Congress would have to formally authorize a new name.)

It's Trump's 200th executive order in his 229 days in office.

• Executive Order ... History of the name.

Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to a group of authors and publishers in the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history, Axios' Kerry Flynn reports.

• Why it matters: The settlement marks a turning point in the clash between AI companies and publishers. It could change how training data is sourced and inspire more deals.

⚖️ Zoom in: The judge ruled that Anthropic's approach to buying physical books and making digital copies for training its large language models was fair use, but said the company had illegally acquired millions of copyrighted books.

• Anthropic will pay an estimated $3,000 per work to roughly 500,000 authors.

Zoom out: Since the lawsuit was settled instead of going to trial, it won't set a legal precedent.

• But it raises the stakes for dozens of similar lawsuits and could push more AI companies toward licensing.

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CBS is changing its rules for editing interviews on its Sunday morning show, "Face the Nation," after days of sharp criticism from the Trump administration over how the network cut its Aug. 31 interview with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

• "In response to audience feedback over the past week," a CBS News statement says, "we have implemented a new policy for greater transparency in our interviews. FACE THE NATION will now only broadcast live or live-to-tape interviews (subject to national security or legal restrictions). This extra measure means the television audience will see the full, unedited interview on CBS and we will continue our practice of posting full transcripts and the unedited video online."

Catch up quick: It's standard practice at networks to cut and edit interviews for clarity or time. CBS News initially stood behind the interview, saying it "met all CBS News standards," The New York Times reports.

• The full segment was 16 minutes and 40 seconds and was released online. The version that aired on TV was 12 minutes and 15 seconds long.

The backdrop: CBS parent Paramount Global recently agreed to pay $16 million to settle a voter interference lawsuit filed by President Trump last October, even as press freedom advocates warned the company was buckling to political pressure.

• Read Noem's statement.

The Powerball jackpot has climbed to $1.8 billion ahead of today's drawing, making it the nation's second-largest lottery prize ever.

• If nobody wins today, Monday's drawing could set a new U.S. record, Axios' Kelly Tyko writes.

Flashback: The world's largest-ever lottery prize was the $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot that one ticket purchased in California won on Nov. 7, 2022.

• Keep reading.

The longest steel slide in the U.S. is 171 feet tall, and it's in Virginia Beach, Axios Richmond's Sabrina Moreno writes.

• The "Whorl" — a spiraling behemoth in Virginia Beach's Owl Creek Landing — requires sliders to climb a third of a mile up and ride down in a "specially made sack."

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