The Justice Department quietly replaced Trump’s “identical” signatures on recent pardons

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department posted a pardon online bearing identical copies of President Donald Trump’s signature before quietly correcting it this week after what the agency called a “technical error.”

The replacements came after online commentators seized on the striking similarities in the president’s signature across a series of Nov. 7 pardons, including those granted to former New York Mets player Darrell Strawberry, former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada, and former NYPD sergeant Michael McMahon. In fact, the signatures on several pardons initially uploaded to the Justice Department’s website were identical, two experts on forensic documents confirmed to The Associated Press.

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Within hours of online speculation, the administration replaced the pardon copies with new ones that did not contain matching signatures. She insisted that Trump, who mercilessly mocked his predecessor’s use of a printing press, originally signed all of the Nov. 7 pardons himself and blamed “technical” and staffing problems for the error, which had no bearing on the validity of the clemency proceedings.

Questions about Trump’s signature come amid a new wave of clemency and weeks after the president claimed he didn’t even know Changping Zhao, the crypto billionaire he pardoned last month. He said in an interview with 60 Minutes that the case was a “witch hunt for Biden.”

“One of the basic axioms of handwriting identification is that no two signatures will have exactly the same design features on every aspect,” said Tom Vastrick, a Florida-based handwriting expert and president of the American Society of Questionable Document Examiners.

“It’s pretty clear,” said Fastrick, who compared the apparently identical images, now visible only through the online Internet Archive, with the replacements at the AP’s request.

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“The site was updated after a technical error where one of the signatures signed by President Trump personally was uploaded in error multiple times due to staffing issues caused by the Democrats’ shutdown,” Justice Department spokesman Chad Gilmartin said.

“There is no story here other than the fact that President Trump signed seven pardons by hand and that the Department of Justice posted the same seven pardons with seven unique signatures on our website,” Gilmartin said in a statement to the AP, referring to the latest wave of clemency granted by Trump in recent weeks.

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson wrote in an email that Trump “signed each one of these pardons by hand as he does all pardons.”

“The media should be spending their time investigating Joe Biden’s countless automatic pardons, not covering a non-story,” she wrote.

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Trump has been an outspoken critic of Biden’s use of the Autopen to conduct executive business, going so far as to display a photo of one of the devices in place of his predecessor on the new “Presidential Walk of Fame” he created along the columns of the West Wing. His Republican allies in Congress last month issued a scathing criticism of Biden’s alleged “diminished faculties” and mental state during his term, which ranked the Democrat’s use of the drive-thru among the “greatest scandals in US history.”

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.

The House Oversight Committee found that “senior White House officials did not know who operated the pen and that its use was not adequately monitored or documented to prevent abuse.” “The Committee considers void all executive actions signed by pen without appropriate, contemporaneous, and contemporaneous written approval traceable to the approval of the President himself.”

Republicans who control the committee on Friday issued a statement describing Trump’s potential use of an electronic signature as legitimate, which distinguishes it from Biden’s signature.

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But Rep. Dave Maine, a California Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, seized on the apparent similarities in the initial version of the pardon and called for an investigation into the matter, laying out Republican arguments against Biden in a statement to the AP that “we need to better understand who is actually in charge of the White House, because Trump appears to be slipping.”

Regardless, legal experts say that the use of the automatic pen has no effect on the validity of the pardon.

“The key to the validity of a pardon is whether the president intends to grant the pardon,” said Frank Bowman, a legal historian and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law who is writing a book on pardons. “Any re-signing is an obvious and somewhat ridiculous effort to avoid comparison with Biden.”

Much of Trump’s mercy has gone to political allies, campaign donors and fraudsters who have claimed to be victims of a “weaponized” Justice Department. Trump has largely abandoned a process that was historically overseen by non-political employees at the Justice Department.

In September, Casada, a former Republican speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, was sentenced to three years in prison. He was convicted of working with a former legislative aide to win taxpayer-funded mailing business from state lawmakers who previously ousted Casada from office amid a sexting scandal.

Strawberry was convicted in the 1990s on tax evasion and drug charges. Trump cited the 1983 National League Rookie of the Year following his career for his Christian faith and longtime sobriety when pardoning him.

McMahon, a former New York City police sergeant, was sentenced this spring to 18 months in prison for his role in what a federal judge called a “transnational crackdown.” He was convicted of acting as a foreign agent for China after he tried to intimidate a former official into returning to his home country.

McMahon’s defense attorney, Lawrence Lustberg, said he was not aware the pardon documents had been replaced until an AP reporter contacted him on Friday.

“It has always been our understanding that President Trump granted Mr. McMahon his clemency,” Lustberg wrote in an email.

Mustan reported from Natchitoches, Louisiana. AP correspondent Eric Tucker contributed reporting from Washington.