Justice Department quietly replaced ‘identical’ Trump signatures on recent pardons
The Justice Department posted pardons online bearing identical copies of President Donald Trump’s signature before quietly correcting them this week after what the agency called a “technical error.”
The replacements came after online commenters seized on striking similarities in the president’s signature across a series of pardons dated Nov. 7, including those granted to former New York Mets player Darryl Strawberry, former Tennessee House speaker Glen Casada and former New York police sergeant Michael McMahon. In fact, the signatures on several pardons initially uploaded to the Justice Department’s website were identical, two forensic document experts confirmed to The Associated Press.
Within hours of the online speculation, the administration replaced copies of the pardons with new ones that did not feature identical signatures. It insisted Trump, who mercilessly mocked his predecessor’s use of an autopen, had originally signed all the Nov. 7 pardons himself and blamed “technical” and staffing issues for the error, which has no bearing on the validity of the clemency actions.
The questions about Trump’s signature come amid a new flurry of clemency and weeks after the president claimed to not even know Changpeng Zhao, a crypto billionaire he pardoned last month. He said in an interview with 60 Minutes that the case had been “a Biden witch hunt.”
“A basic axiom of handwriting identification science is that no two signatures are going to bear the exact same design features in every aspect,” said Tom Vastrick, a Florida-based handwriting expert who is president of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners.
“It’s very straightforward,” said Vastrick, who compared the apparently identical images, now only visible through the online Internet Archive, with the replacements at AP’s request.
Chad Gilmartin, a Justice Department spokesperson, said the “website was updated after a technical error where one of the signatures President Trump personally signed was mistakenly uploaded multiple times due to staffing issues caused by the Democrat shutdown.”
There is no story here other than the fact that President Trump signed seven pardons by hand and DOJ posted those same seven pardons with seven unique signatures to our website,” Gilmartin said in a statement to AP, referring to the latest wave of clemency Trump has granted in recent weeks.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an email that Trump “signed each one of these pardons by hand as he does with all pardons.”
“The media should spend their time investigating Joe Biden’s countless auto penned pardons, not covering a non-story,” she wrote.
Trump has been an outspoken critic of Biden’s use of the autopen to conduct executive business, going as far as to display a picture of one such device in place of a portrait of his predecessor in a new “Presidential Walk of Fame” he created along the West Wing colonnade. His Republican allies in Congress last month released a blistering critique of Biden’s alleged “diminished faculties” and mental state during his term that ranked the Democrat’s use of the autopen among “the greatest scandals in U.S. history.”
The Republicans said their findings cast doubt on all of Biden’s actions in office and sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi urging a full investigation.