THEY DO HAVE TO COME FROM THE PRESIDENT, THOUGH: Pardons and Autopen Signatures: A 2024 Appellate Decision Says Pardons Don’t Have to Be Signed (or Even Written) at All. “Of course, something is required, and that something is presumably a statement by the President that he is pardoning someone. If (and this is a very big if) a President actually didn’t make such a statement, and an assistant just affixed the President’s signature to a document purporting to be a pardon without the President’s authorization, then I don’t see how that would be a valid pardon (at least unless it’s somehow ratified by the relevant President). But that turns on a factual question about whether the President was actually involved in the creation of the pardons, not on a legal question about whether an autopen signature renders the pardon invalid.”

As I said below, it’s possible that Trump knows something about how things happened.