Questions arise over strikingly similar signatures by Trump on recent pardons | Donald Trump

The Trump administration’s pardon effort is coming under scrutiny this week after the justice department replaced other pardons posted online with strikingly similar copies of Trump’s signature and other markedly variable pardons.

The corrections came after online commenters noticed similarities in the president’s signature granting “full and unconditional” pardons to seven people, including the former New York Mets player. Darryl Strawberryformer Tennessee House speaker Glen Casada and former New York police sergeant Michael McMahon on Nov. 7.

Administration officials blamed “technical” errors and personnel problems for the apparent oversight and insisted to The Associated Press that Trump initially signed all the pardons himself.

Justice department spokesman Chad Gilmartin said “the website was updated following a technical error in which one of President Trump’s personally signed signatures was mistakenly uploaded multiple times due to personnel issues caused by the Democratic shutdown.”

“There is no story here other than the fact that President Trump personally signed and signed seven pardons. [the Department of Justice] He posted the same seven pardons on our website with seven unique signatures,” Gilmartin told The Associated Press, referencing the latest wave of clemency that Trump has shown in recent weeks.

White House press secretary Abigail Jackson wrote in an email that Trump “hand-signed each of these pardons, as he does all pardons.”

“The media should spend their time investigating Joe Biden’s numerous automatic pardons, rather than covering a false story,” he wrote.

The errors follow an administration campaign to undermine the validity of pardons issued by Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, and in many cases signed by autopen. Trump claimed Biden was unaware of the signatures orders and pardons It bears his name.

Trump, who often makes an elaborate show of signing executive orders with Sharpie during afternoon press conferences, went so far as to replace Biden’s portrait with an autopen painting on his new “Presidential Walk of Fame” along the West Wing colonnade.

Asked last week if he was considering replacing the photo with a portrait, Trump said, “No, I don’t think so.”

Questions arise about Trump’s signature A new wave of amnesty orders. Last month, Trump granted clemency to Changpeng Zhao, later telling CBS News that he had “no idea who he was” but had been told the cryptocurrency businessman was the victim of a “witch hunt” by the Biden administration.

Zhao, also known as “CZ”, pleaded guilty in 2023 to charges of enabling money laundering. He served four months in prison and agreed to resign as CEO of Binance, the crypto exchange he founded.

“The fundamental axiom of the science of handwriting identification is that no two signatures will have the same design features in every respect,” Thomas Vastrick, a Florida-based handwriting expert and president of the American Association of Suspicious Document Examiners, told the AP.

“It’s very simple,” Vastrick added.

Legal experts say the automatic closure has no impact on the validity of the pardons.

“The key to the validity of a pardon is whether the president is willing to grant it,” said Frank Bowman, a legal historian and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law who wrote a book on pardons. “Any re-signing is a blatant and rather foolish effort to avoid comparisons with Biden.”

The pardons Trump issued earlier this month include Casada, the disgraced former Republican speaker of the Tennessee legislature who was sentenced to three years in prison in September after being convicted of conspiring with a former legislative aide to win the taxpayer-funded mail business from state lawmakers who had previously ousted Casada during a sexting scandal.

Strawberry was convicted of tax evasion and drug charges in the 1990s. McMahon was sentenced to 18 months in prison earlier this year for his role in what a federal judge called a “transnational pressure campaign.”

The justice department’s change of Trump’s signature on the pardon documents is unlikely to stop Republicans from automatically trolling Biden.

Last month, Republicans in Congress issued a sharp critique of Biden’s alleged “diminishing abilities” and mental state during his tenure, ranking the Democrat’s use of autopen among the “greatest scandals in US history.”

Republicans say their findings cast doubt on all of Biden’s actions in office and sent a letter He called for a thorough investigation by U.S. attorney Pam Bondi.

“Senior White House officials did not know who was operating otopen, and its use was not adequately controlled or documented to prevent abuse,” the House oversight committee said. “The Committee hereby declares invalid all executive actions signed by autopen without appropriate, corresponding, concurrent, written approval traceable to the president’s own consent.”

On Friday, Republicans who control the committee issued a statement calling Trump’s potential use of electronic signatures legitimate and distinguishing it from Biden’s.

Dave Min, a California Democrat on the House oversight committee, took advantage of the apparent similarities in the first version of the pardons and called for an investigation, using Republicans’ arguments against Biden in a statement to the AP: “We need to get a better understanding of who’s actually in charge of the White House, because Trump seems to be slipping.”

Associated Press contributed reporting