A rumor that circulated online in January 2026 claimed an appeals court had vacated retired infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci's "autopen pardon."
The term "autopen pardon" referred to U.S. President Donald Trump's claim that many of former President Joe Biden's actions in the executive office, including pardons, were invalid because he signed them with an autopen, a device that replicates a person's signature. Biden issued a pardon for Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and his former chief medical adviser, shortly before leaving office in 2025.
On Jan. 6, a user managing the America's Last Line of Defense Facebook page posted (archived) an image of Fauci with the caption, "The 14th District Court of Appeals has vacated Anthony Fauci's Autopen Pardon. 'There's no credible proof that the President intended to issue the pardon; therefore, it's null and void.' Fauci will face a multitude of charges, starting with lying to Congress and the FBI."
(America's Last Line of Defense/Facebook)
Some users reposting the rumor and commenting under the Facebook post seemed to interpret the matter as a factual recounting of real-life events. Others shared the rumor on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived) and X (archived).
In short, this rumor was not true.
The claim originated with America's Last Line of Defense — the name of the aforementioned Facebook page and also the name of its network of Facebook pages and websites publishing content labeled as parody and satire. The ALLOD Facebook page's bio features a disclaimer reading in part, "Nothing on this page is real." An ALLOD logo appeared in the Fauci image as one small sign of the fictional story. A community note displayed under the post clarified for users the Facebook page's satirical platform.
Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no evidence of a court vacating a presidential pardon. The mention of a "14th Circuit Court of Appeals" in the ALLOD satire piece was nothing more than a joke, considering only 13 federal courts of appeals exist. ALLOD has featured the fictional federal "14th Circuit Court of Appeals" in other posts.
Background on Fauci and autopen pardon claim
Fauci served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health from 1984 to 2022.
In 2020, during the final year of U.S. President Donald Trump's first term, Fauci prominently featured as a member of the White House's coronavirus task force. He later occupied the position of Biden's chief medical adviser until his retirement in 2022. Biden pardoned Fauci on Jan. 19, 2025, his last full day in office.
The Associated Press reported of Fauci's history with the Trump administration:
[Fauci] helped coordinate the nation's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and raised Trump's ire when he resisted Trump's untested public health notions. Fauci has since become a target of intense hatred and vitriol from people on the right, who blame him for mask mandates and other policies they believe infringed on their rights, even as hundreds of thousands of people were dying.
"Despite the accomplishments that my colleagues and I achieved over my long career of public service, I have been the subject of politically-motivated threats of investigation and prosecution," Fauci said in a statement. "There is absolutely no basis for these threats. Let me be perfectly clear: I have committed no crime."
In July 2025, The New York Times extensively reported about the Biden administration's last-minute pardon for Fauci, including the Trump administration's claim that Biden was cognitively impaired and not in control of clemency decisions at the end of his term. Biden told the Times he orally made all clemency decisions himself, asserting he provided approval for the signatures with autopen — a technology the AP reported U.S. presidents have used for decades.
For further reading, we previously reported whether Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to have Fauci extradited to Russia in exchange for ending the war in Ukraine.