President Trump ordered his White House counsel and the attorney general on Wednesday to investigate former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his staff in Mr. Trump’s latest attempt to stoke outlandish conspiracy theories about his predecessor.
In an executive order, Mr. Trump put the power and resources of the federal government to work examining whether some of Mr. Biden’s presidential actions were legally invalid because his aides had enacted those policies without his knowledge.
The executive order came after Mr. Trump shared a social media post over the weekend that claimed Mr. Biden had been “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone, following a pattern of suggestions by the president and his allies that Mr. Biden was a mentally incapacitated puppet of his aides.
The former president called such claims “ridiculous and false” in a statement on Wednesday after the order’s release….
Since his return to office, Mr. Trump has embarked on a campaign of retribution against his perceived enemies, with Mr. Biden as a key target. He has moved to strip Mr. Biden’s security clearance and ordered investigations into the Biden administration’s handling of a range of issues.
But the ordered inquiry into a conspiracy theory about the former president himself was a startling escalation.
“The White House issued over 1,200 presidential documents, appointed 235 judges to the federal bench, and issued more pardons and commutations than any administration in United States history,” the executive order said, after asserting that “former President Biden’s aides abused the power” of his office….