Tangle - Biden's autopen controversy.

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Biden’s use of the autopen. On Tuesday, Fox News reported that the White House Counsel’s Office — in coordination with the Justice Department — is investigating former President Joe Biden’s use of an autopen while in office. The Trump administration says the investigation will examine how Biden used the autopen, a machine that reproduces a person’s signature, over his presidential term, and whether the Biden administration had a policy in place to regulate its use. The Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee is also investigating whether Biden understood the actions he authorized with the autopen. Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠, our “Under the Radar” story ⁠here and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.Take the survey: What do you think of Biden’s use of the autopen? Let us know!Disagree? That's okay. My opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we'll consider publishing your feedback.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by: Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Hunter Casperson, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you when you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the Summer Pre-Roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers.

When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that actually they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer,

so download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. And welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit

of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. And on today's episode, we are going to be talking about the Biden AutoPen story. That's something I honestly expected us to cover, but it's broken through a bit. And, you know, there's enough commentary on it that it feels like it's become a story now. And there is some real stuff here, some interesting stuff, I think, at least to hone in on and discuss a bit. Before we jump into that, I want to give you a quick heads up that tomorrow our managing

editor Ari Weitzman and the co-host on the Sunday, soon to be Friday, soon to be named and announced podcast with me, is working on a comprehensive piece on climate change. How our understanding has lagged behind the scientific consensus and what the latest models tell us about what's coming. And a spoiler alert, it's not what they were saying 10 or 20 years ago.

Ari's gonna be doing a read down of the piece for the members only podcast that will come out in the next couple of days. But before that gets released, if you want to make sure you get it, you need to go to readtangle.com forward slash membership and become a Tangle member. A reminder, if you do that and you choose the podcast option, that gets you ad free podcasts. So if you don't like ads, which I don't love ads on podcasts, it's how we make money, but I often subscribe to podcasts to get rid of them.

You can do that with Tangle too. You can get a members only feed that doesn't just get you ad free podcasts. It also gets you a bunch of additional content, including those Friday additions that other non-paid members don't receive in their feed. So you should go do that. Readtangle.com forward slash membership.

You'll get Ari's piece tomorrow. You'll get all kinds of interviews and bonus content and fun stuff that we release on the feed. All right, with that out of the way, I'm going to send it over to Will for today's main story and I'll be back for my take. Thanks, Isaac. All right, here are today's quick hits. Number one, President Donald Trump denied that he plans to attempt to fire Federal Reserve

Chair Jerome Powell, though Trump suggested he could move to oust the chair for cause in the near future. Number two, the Senate voted 51 to 48 to pass a rescission package that would cancel about nine billion dollars in funding that had previously been approved for international aid and public broadcasting. The package now goes to the House for a vote. Number three, the Trump administration fired Maureen Comey, a federal prosecutor in New York City who worked on the criminal cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The reason for her dismissal has not yet been specified.

Number four, the Syrian government and leaders in the Druze religious minority announced a ceasefire after several days of conflict and Israeli military intervention. Separately, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said that at least 20 people were killed in a stampede at an aid distribution site in the southern Gaza Strip. And finally, number five, the Department of Homeland Security deported five unauthorized immigrants with criminal records to Eswatini, continuing its practice of deporting non-citizens to countries other than their country of origin. The New York Times is reporting that former President Biden told them that he had orally granted all the pardons and commutations issued at the end of his term, meaning he did not

personally sign the official warrants for clemency. Biden told the Times that he did in fact make every single onerants for clemency. Biden told the Times that he did in fact make every single one of the clemency decisions himself, but says that the auto pen was used to sign the warrants since there were a lot of them. Now, according to the Times, Biden called Trump and Republicans liars for saying he was incapacitated and his aides used the auto pen without his authorization. On Tuesday, Fox News reported that the White House counsel's office in coordination with the Justice Department is

investigating former President Joe Biden's use of an auto pen while in office. The Trump administration says the investigation will examine how Biden used the auto pen, which is a machine that reproduces a person's signature over the course of his presidential term, and whether the Biden administration had a policy in place to regulate its use. The Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee is also investigating whether Biden understood the actions he authorized with the auto pen. Quick refresher. In the final days of his presidency, Biden commuted the sentences

of nearly 2,500 criminal defendants, a single-day record. Biden also issued preemptive pardons for political figures and members of his family shortly before President Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20th, which prompted further scrutiny about the clemency actions. The former president justified the pardons as a protection against ongoing, quote, baseless and politically motivated investigations, end quote. Separately, in December, Biden commuted the sentences of approximately 1,500 people and pardoned 39 others, including former elected officials who had been convicted of racketeering

and embezzlement. On Thursday, July 10th, Biden told the New York Times that he orally granted all the pardons and commutations issued at the end of his term and rejected suggestions that he deferred any decisions to his staff. The former president said he used the auto pen because of the quantity of clemency decisions issued and noted that other presidents have also used the tool. Separately, he called Republicans who suggested that he was incapacitated in office, quote, liars. House Oversight Chair James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky, has sought to subpoena Biden administration officials to testify about the president's

mental fitness in office. Some members of Biden's staff, such as his deputy chief of staff, Annie Tomasini, have agreed to speak with investigators, but others have declined to cooperate. White House physician, Kevin O'Connor, invoked physician patient privilege and the Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination in declining to sit for a deposition. And former First Lady Jill Biden's chief of staff, Anthony Bernal also pleaded the fifth. Many legal experts say Biden's acts of

clemency cannot be voided regardless of the investigation's conclusions. And despite President Trump's claims, quote, the Constitution doesn't even require that the pardon be written, Bernadette Mailer, a Stanford Law School professor and constitutional law expert, said. So the idea that the signature is by auto pen rather than by handwritten signature seems not relevant. Today, we'll explore the debate over Biden's auto pen use with views from the right and left. then Isaac's take.

We'll be right back after this quick break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose. Maybe it's a little too flimsy. Or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you when you dropped it on the ground.

There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the Summer Pre-Roll and Infuse Pre-Roll Sale today at ocs.ca pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at OCS.ca and participating retailers. What's better than a well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.

Service fees, exclusions, and term supply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Here's what the right is saying. Most on the right view the story as a scandal that underscores Biden's limited capacity in office. Some say Biden further incriminated himself in his New York Times interview. Others say that Trump's argument is legally weak, but politically salient. The New York Post editorial board said Biden's defense of aides who used his auto pen speaks

volumes about who really was in charge. Biden claimed he made every decision himself when it came to the 25 auto pen signed pardon and commutation warrants that his White House issued in the final months of his presidency. But then he admitted that he didn't explicitly agree to each and every clemency winner. His excuse, quote, we're talking about a whole lot of people, the board wrote exactly how involved was he not very the Biden White House had a quote process for approving the pardons that seemed to only minimally include him. Biden didn't seem bothered by his staff's liberal use of auto pen, but he has a stake in pushing the narrative that he was a okay

with the setup. What's left of his battered legacy and his pride would further be tarnished by an admission that he wasn't fully in charge, the board said. Joe clearly meant to take the heat off by telling the Times he was the only one making the decisions, but his own words put the lie to that. All they do is confirm that the GOPers trying to get answers about who was running the country under Biden are on the right track. In National Review, Jeffrey Blair wrote about Biden's auto pen folly. Biden certainly seemed to have no idea whom specifically he was pardoning or if his aides had faithfully applied his criteria. I'm pretty sure that he wasn't trying to

commute the sentence of Jimmy Demora, for example, one of the most corrupt men in the last half century of Ohio politics. Biden has managed to thicken the cloud of suspicion that hangs over all domestic political acts taken during his presidency," Blair said. The funniest thing about this self-inflicted damage, though, is how needless it was. Why is Biden out there giving self-defeating New York Times interviews anyway? Nobody actually cares whether Biden was using an autopen. There is no legal argument to be made there.

Trump was as serious about undoing Biden's laws and pardons over the auto-pin issue as he is about deporting Rosie O'Donnell. Trump could not undo those commutations even if he wanted to, and he most certainly doesn't want to. They're a political gift to him and a way to shift the blame to senile Joe when Trump is feeling the heat, Blair wrote. All Biden had to do was remain silent, but the vain old man simply can't help himself. Even in his extreme dotage, character remains destiny. In The Dispatch, Nick Catagio explored earnest and cynical reasons to care about Joe Biden's auto-pen pardons.

I don't think Trump's interest in the matter is particularly complicated. He envisioned his second presidency as an exercise in retribution, and Biden's last-minute pardons deprived him of the targets he was most eager to hit, Katasio said. Another reason for Republican interest in the AutoPen matter is that MAGA has always run on conspiracy theories from Barack Obama's birth certificate to the deep state plot against Trump, to the rigged election of 2020, to the Jeff Epstein client list.

There's no degree of civic or moral corruption to which liberals won't stoop to cling to power. That's the grassroots rights core conviction. The Autopen affair is useful in a third way to Trump. It's a reminder, albeit a pitiful one, to voters that no matter how unhappy they might be with him, things could be worse. In that respect, the Autopen pardons were a godsend. Granting clemency to presidential relatives was shady as hell.

Doing it via dubious process guaranteed to invite suspicions about Biden's competence and the lawfulness of his orders was just the icing on the cake. All right, here's what the left is saying. The left calls the story a fabricated scandal. Alright, here's what the left is saying. The left calls the story a fabricated scandal, arguing that Biden's use of the auto pen was perfectly legal.

Some say the investigations are more about scoring political points than uncovering any wrongdoing. Others suggest Trump is fixated on painting Biden as an illegitimate president. In MSNBC, Hayes Brown wrote, presidents using auto pens is not a crime. Trump's obsession with the use of an auto pen in Biden's White House stretches back months. He claimed in March that pardons Biden signed were supposedly void because of an auto pen's use. Last month, he foreshadowed to reporters that his administration would,

quote, start looking into the whole thing of who signed this legislation, end quote. Brown said, would quote, start looking into the whole thing of who signed this legislation, end quote. Brown said, It's a bonkers line of inquiry, not the least because auto pens aren't exactly a new thing for a chief executive to use. Presidents going back to Harry Truman have had them around to sign their names to personal documents and correspondence. Whatever probe Attorney General Pam Bondi conducts would theoretically hinge not on whether the White House Autopen was used to sign official documents, but on somehow proving that it was used without Biden's express authorization. Is there any evidence backing up Trump's allegation?

Of course not, and Trump himself said as much. Brown wrote, None of this will amount to anything legally without concrete evidence that a law or other official document was falsely signed without Biden's consent. In both reality and the conspiracy theory being spun here, the AutoPen is merely a tool to be used. In the Washington Post, Philip Bump suggested the GOP doesn't really care how the pardons were signed. There is no serious question that Biden fully intended to issue the flurry of pardons that bore his signature in the waning days of his presidency.

Yet thanks to a combination of a media cycle fixated on Biden's mental capacity and the opportunism of the Trump White House, right-wing media and Fox News in particular are now heavily invested in the idea that he didn't, Bump said. This isn't a mystery requiring a solution. Biden talked about the pardons. In fact, there was a great deal of public discussion on the subject, which is why reporters kept asking him about them. The goal of the conversation is to cast a pall of illegitimacy over everything that occurred during Biden's administration. On any issue or decision, Trump and his allies have leaned into dismissing Biden's work as a function of some nefarious non-presidential actor. As with Fox News' Jesse Waters deranged musings about the former first lady se ceasing control of the pen,

Bump wrote. If the Justice Department or Republicans or the House Oversight Committee or Trump and his team want to know whether Biden approved the pardons that he approved, they could hear it from the man himself. But that's not really what they want to know. And finally in Salon, Austin Serratt said, It's not about the auto pen. Trump is still obsessed with losing to Biden. Auto pens, really? With all the problems confronting this country, our president is focused on auto pens, Surratt wrote.

Nothing in the Constitution requires a president to sign a pardon. Article 2 says that only the president, quote, shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment." End quote. It does not specify any particular form or procedure to make such a grant. But for President Trump, well-researched and reasoned

legal opinions, court decisions, and the views of experts matter less than the latest conspiracy theory floated by his right-wing MAGA allies, Sirot said. The president may get pleasure from using the auto pen nonsense to replay some of his greatest hits and suggests yet again that a quote, senile Biden was not in charge as president and quote, but at the same time, it allows him to promote one of his favorite conspiracy theories, namely that his predecessor was a tool of a quote, deep state that pulled

the strings. All right, that is it for what the right and left are saying. Now I will send it back over to Isaac for his take. All right, that is it for the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. One of the stories that we can tell about Biden's auto pen is uncomplicated and legally straightforward. The other raises all sorts of reasonable questions and reminders about the flaws of the Biden administration.

Here's the uncomplicated story. President Biden was in the last few weeks of his presidency. The president wanted to protect many people he thought Trump would go after and also commute the sentences of people with criminal records he believed should be given some grace. He was, by many accounts, limited in his capacity to do the job. So when his staff brought him a collection of pardons and commutations, he offloaded the physical work of signing the pardons to the auto pen, which was managed closely by his top aides. Auto pens aren't new. Presidents have used them for years, typically to sign things like letters

to Americans, though some presidents, including Obama, have used it for legislation. Biden commuted a lot of sentences, literally a historical amount, and it seems pretty clear the president wanted all of them to happen. Trump, who had not been shy about campaigning on seeking retribution on his enemies from the first term, was incensed that Biden did this. When he discovered that Biden himself may not have signed all the pardons by hand, his political instincts kicked in. He saw a clear opportunity to raise questions about who was really in charge, take shots at Biden's mental acuity, and distract the media from the Epstein story, which is currently tearing his base apart. Biden, rather than just ignoring the noise

and letting the story die, couldn't help but give an interview to the New York Times, where he gave a series of halting and hard to read confused answers, drawing more attention to the controversy and making the situation markedly worse. That's the first story. No evidence shows that any pardons were signed off without the president markedly worse. That's the first story. No evidence shows that any pardons were signed off

without the president's approval yet. Biden himself spoke publicly about many of the pardons at the time, and he seemed to remember his justification for quite a few of them in his interview with the New York Times, even if his answers were characteristically garbled and hard to understand.

For a lot of people, this story is sufficient, and the saga doesn't go any further than that. The second story is a bit more complex, but also entirely feasible. First, and most importantly, many of Biden's pardons range from suspect to shocking. The Hunter Biden pardon was a political mistake, but a slew of others are so hard to justify

that they can only be explained by outright malice or sheer negligence. Michael Connahan, who perpetrated the Kids for Cash theme in Pennsylvania, Rita Cronwell, who committed the largest municipal fraud in the United States history, Jim Carlson, who ran a synthetic drug ring in Minnesota, tested drugs on his own employees

and caused the public health crisis in Duluth. These are not the kinds of people who deserve clemency, but they got it from the Biden administration. Learning now that Biden himself may not have been the person to actually sign off on these pardons is pretty jarring. On the one hand, I don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill. On the other hand, is it really too much to ask

that the president actually signed the pardons he is approving by hand? Is that too high a standard? I understand that some of these pardons were issued in mass, but they did not need to be. That was, supposedly, the president's choice. And to be perfectly clear, Biden did not have to sign thousands of individual pieces of paper to make this happen.

If he did, that would have provided a good excuse for using the auto pen. But in reality, he only needed to sign a few dozen proclamations that covered thousands of people. The worst case scenario is not entirely implausible here either. Were Biden's staff and aides working in concert to elevate pardons or clemency that they wanted to see, and then pushing them through without oversight from Biden

because the process was somewhat disconnected from the president himself? We know from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book that some people believe a group of high-level aides were effectively running the country in the end. We also know from New York Times reporting that Biden's chief of staff, Jeff Zients, was approving the use of the auto pen for pardons via email. It's not at all unreasonable to ask if Zients was working on Biden's best wishes or his own. All of this speculation comes from Biden's abdication of a very basic duty. If you decide to grant clemency to hundreds or thousands of people and you apparently aren't reviewing each individual case in its own right,

then I think you should do the laborious act of signing your own name to it. That's the job. And if Biden was not capable of signing his name to the 25 pardon and commutation warrants issued between December 2024 and January 2025 because he didn't have the physical ability, the interest or the 30 seconds, that's a separate problem that needs to be addressed. Even though Biden is no longer president, Republicans are all too happy to address it. Now, are their motives pure and apolitical? Of course not. And is the issue really that important given everything else happening in the world right now? Again, no. But the degree to which Biden was in control at the end of his presidency is a very important issue. And even though the AutoPen question isn't central to it, the questions it

raises can help us learn more about Biden's mental state and leadership towards the end of his term. His own decisions, from the use of the auto pen to his insistence to stay in the 2024 race until it was too late for Democrats to manage a transition precipitated the kind of coverage he's getting now. That's not anyone's fault, but his. We'll be right back after this quick break. We'll be right back after this quick break. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale.

Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose, maybe it's a little too flimsy, or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect. The pre-roll. Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at OCS.ca and participating retailers. What's better than a well marbled rib-eye sizzling on the barbecue? A well marbled rib-eye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door.

A well marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one's from Mark in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Mark said, are confirmation hearings conducted under oath? And if so, has a cabinet member ever been brought up on perjury charges

after demonstrably doing the thing they said they wouldn't? Okay, so to your first question, yes, it is standard practice for nominees for appointed positions to swear an oath to tell you the truth before their congressional appointment hearings. But no, nobody has ever been charged with perjury for false statements during their nomination hearings. There are a few reasons for this. First, prosecutors have to clear a high bar

to successfully charge someone with perjury. According to the US statute that defines perjury, the accused must be shown to have made not just a misleading or vague statement, but one that was blatantly false, material to their testimony, and given knowingly and willfully. This legal standard rules out someone making a promise

during their hearing that they later break. Furthermore, if some members of Congress accuse a nominee of perjury during their trial, that person has the opportunity to amend their testimony through a written statement before being charged. This happened in 2017 when all nine Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee accused the recently confirmed Attorney General Jeff Sessions of perjury for misrepresenting his contact

with Russia during his confirmation hearing. Sessions then submitted amended testimony and said he would recuse himself from any investigation into President Trump for alleged connections to Russia. Other nominees were accused of lying under oath, but no charges were filed. This happened when the Senate rejected President George H.W. Bush's nomination of John Tower

for Secretary of Defense in 1989 for lying about his drinking. Some successful nominees like Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh were not charged, likely because of the difficulty of winning a conviction and the political fallout that the legal accusations would have created. However, some people have given congressional testimony

not as nominees, have later been convicted of perjury. This group includes Watergate co-conspirator, G. Gordon Liddy and sprinter Marion Jones. Others like President Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, likely committed perjury, but pleaded guilty to other crimes. And perhaps most memorably, there was President Bill Clinton,

who was impeached for lying to Congress about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, though Congress did not vote to remove him from office. All right, that is it for your questions answered. I'm gonna send it back to Will for the rest of today's pod and keep an eye out tomorrow for Ari's piece on climate change. And of course, we'll get that podcast

with Ari, Camille and I out to you very soon, over the weekend. Have a good one. Peace. Thanks, Isaac. Jumping back in with our Under the Radar story. On Tuesday, the Institute for Science and International Security released a report on the impact of Israel's killings of top Iranian scientists in June. The report found that these deaths, quote, deprived Iran's nuclear weapons program of its most capable and experienced personnel

and, quote, weakened Iran's base for building nuclear weapons, eliminating needed expertise and hard-to-get management experience. End quote. While Israel has targeted Iranian scientists in the past, the Institute said those killings did not significantly disrupt Iran's nuclear program. This time, however, they suggest that the attacks may be far more difficult for Iran to recover from, noting both the loss of those scientists' critical knowledge and the chilling effect their deaths could have on Iran's remaining nuclear scientist. We have the link to the report in today's episode notes. You can check it out there.

On to today's number section. The year the AutoPen was patented, originally known as the polygraph machine, was 1803. Next, the year the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department published a memorandum opinion that the president may use an Auto auto pen to sign legislation was 2005. And the year that President Barack Obama used an auto pen to sign an extension of the Patriot Act was 2011, and it was the first use of the machine to sign legislation.

The number of acts of clemency granted by President Joe Biden during his term was 4,245, the most of any president on record, according to Pew Research. The percentage of requests for clemency granted by Biden during his term was 29%. The number of pardons issued by Biden was 80, and that's the second fewest on record of any president. The number of commutations granted by Biden

on January 17th, 2025 alone was 2,490, more in a single day than any prior president had granted over their entire presidency. And finally, the percentage of Biden's acts of clemency granted during the final fiscal year of his presidency was 96%. Alright, let's take it home with today's Have a Nice Day story. Mount Everest has long struggled with trash accumulation on its slopes, and for years Sherpas have navigated a dangerous four-hour hike to remove that garbage. However, this season they had assistance from two giant drones that can complete the perilous

700-meter route in six minutes. One Sherpa who works for the expeditions firm Asian Trekking estimates that drones have transported over 70% of the garbage carted off the mountain by his team this year. He said quote, we're very happy we want more drones carrying heavier weights. Bloomberg has this story and the link to it is in today's show notes. Alright that is it for today's edition we will be back tomorrow with Ari's piece on climate change. Very excited to share that with you all. Until then, have a great day.

Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Lull. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kavak and associate editors Hunter Kaspersen, Audrey Moorehead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Knuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website

at retangle.com. This episode is sponsored by the OCS Summer Pre-Roll Sale. Sometimes when you roll your own joint, things can turn out a little differently than what you expected. Maybe it's a little too loose, maybe it's a little too flimsy, or maybe it's a little too covered in dirt because your best friend distracted you and you dropped it on the ground. There's a million ways to roll a joint wrong, but there's one roll that's always perfect, the pre-roll.

Shop the summer pre-roll and infuse pre-roll sale today at ocs.ca and participating retailers. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that actually they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer, so download the app and get

delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over deliver.