President Trump announced at the White House that pardons issued last Thanksgiving—most notably two turkeys named Peach and Blossom—may be invalid because they were signed with an autopen, and he declared new pardons while claiming an official determination of invalidity for many of the prior pardons.
President Trump spoke to reporters and used the occasion of the annual turkey pardons to make a sweeping claim about the legitimacy of certain past clemency actions. He framed his announcement as the result of a wide-ranging review and made specific allegations about how last year’s pardons were handled.
During his remarks he said, “Before going any further, I want to make an important announcement because you remember last year, after a thorough and very rigorous investigation by Pam Bondi and all of the people at Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the White House Counsel’s Office, and the Department of Everything…Into a terrible situation caused by a man named Sleepy Joe Biden.”
Trump went on to state that Biden “used an autopen last year for the turkey’s pardon” and asserted his own responsibility to review the matter, saying “the official duty to determine, and I have determined that last year’s turkey pardons are totally invalid, as are the pardons of about every other person that was pardoned.”
He singled out a narrow exception when he acknowledged that Hunter Biden’s pardon was valid, but he insisted “the rest of them are all invalid” and announced that those invalid actions are “hereby null and void.”
The president added a dramatic detail about Peach and Blossom, claiming that authorities had tracked them down and found they “have been located, and they were on their way to be processed, in other words, to be killed.”
Trump used that discovery to justify his immediate clemency: “They will not be served for Thanksgiving dinner,” he said. “We saved them in the nick of time.”
Beyond those two birds, Trump named two other turkeys—Gobble and Waddle—and announced they too would receive clemency. He joked about considering the names Chuck and Nancy after national Democrats but made his disdain clear when he said, “I would never pardon those two people.”
Observers note that President Biden did publicly announce pardons for Peach and Blossom last year, but the new allegation raises a procedural question: whether the act was personally signed or executed by an autopen device. That distinction matters because the president’s signature and the formal act of granting clemency are governed by longstanding norms and legal expectations.
The administration’s narrative implies a broader ripple effect. If pardons can be invalidated on procedural grounds, the claim could be used to challenge a range of actions taken near the end of an administration, which opens political and legal debates about continuity and the rule of law.
Conservative critics welcomed Trump’s announcement as a legitimate effort to restore accountability, arguing that official acts should not be rubber-stamped or executed in ways that dodge scrutiny. Supporters saw the move as both a political jab and a symbolic reclaiming of presidential authority.
Still, practical questions remain about how findings like this are documented and what legal mechanisms exist for retroactively nullifying pardons. Courts and scholars typically weigh intent, authority, and precedent when assessing the validity of executive actions.
The turkey story landed as a vivid, public episode that mixes tradition with controversy, and it served as a platform for broader complaints about transparency and standards in government. For many Republicans, the point is simple: if rules aren’t followed, the results shouldn’t stand unchallenged.
Whether Peach and Blossom will remain out of harm’s way under the new clemency or whether this claim triggers formal review procedures is unclear, and officials on the other side of the aisle have yet to offer a full accounting of how last year’s pardons were executed.
