Justice Department quietly replaced ‘identical’ Trump signatures on recent pardons
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department posted pardons online containing duplicate copies of President Donald Trump’s signature and quietly corrected them this week after what the agency called a “technical error.”
The changes come after online commentators noted striking similarities in the president’s signature on a series of pardons dated Nov. 7, including one issued to the former New York Mets player. Darryl Strawberryformer Tennessee House speaker Glen Casada and former New York police sergeant Michael McMahon. Two forensic document experts confirmed to The Associated Press that the signatures on various pardons uploaded to the Justice Department’s website are, in fact, identical.
A few hours after online speculation, the administration replaced the pardon copies with new ones that did not have the same signatures. Trump, who had brutally mocked his predecessor’s use of autopen, was insisted that he had originally signed all the pardons on November 7 and blamed “technical” and personnel problems for the error; This had nothing to do with the validity of the amnesty acts.
Questions about Trump’s signature come amid a new wave of leniency and weeks after the president claimed he did not even know crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao, whom he pardoned last month. In an interview with 60 Minutes, he said the case was a “witch hunt against Biden.”
“The basic axiom of the science of handwriting identification is that no two signatures will have exactly the same design features in every respect,” said Tom Vastrick, president of the American Association of Suspicious Document Examiners and a Florida-based handwriting expert.
“It’s very simple,” Vastrick said, comparing the seemingly identical images, now available only through the online Internet Archive, with images that were altered at the AP’s request.
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 resulting from the Democratic shutdown.”
“There is no story other than the fact that President Trump hand-signed seven pardons and the Department of Justice posted the same seven pardons on our website with seven unique signatures,” Gilmartin told the AP, referring to the latest wave of clemency 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 the numerous automatic pardons that Joe Biden has issued, not covering a topic that is not a story,” he wrote.
Trump has been an outspoken critic of Biden’s use of autopen to conduct administrative business, going so far as to display an image of such a device instead of his predecessor’s portrait on a new “Presidential Walk of Fame” along the West Wing colonnade. His Republican allies in Congress issued a statement last month. severe criticism Biden’s alleged “declining abilities” and mental state during his tenure listed the Democrat’s use of otopen 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 calling for a thorough investigation.
“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 deems 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.
But Rep. Dave Min, a California Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, seized on 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.”
Regardless, 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.”
Much of Trump’s mercy is gone political alliescampaign donors and fraudsters who claim to be victims of an “armed” Justice Department. Trump has largely sidelined a process historically overseen by the Justice Department’s nonpolitical staff.
Casada, the disgraced former Republican speaker of the Tennessee House, was sentenced to three years in prison in September. prison. He was convicted of working with a former legislative aide to win the taxpayer-funded postal business from state lawmakers who had previously impeached Casada over a sex scandal.
strawberry He was convicted of tax evasion and drug charges in the 1990s. In pardoning himself, Trump cited the 1983 National League Rookie of the Year’s post-career embrace of Christian faith and long-term sobriety.
McMahon, a former New York City police sergeant, was sentenced to 18 months in prison this spring for his role in what a federal judge called a “transnational pressure campaign.” He was convicted of acting as a foreign agent for China after trying to intimidate a former official into returning to his homeland.
McMahon’s defense attorney, Lawrence Lustberg, said he was not aware the pardon documents had been changed until an AP reporter contacted him on Friday.
“It is and always has been our understanding that President Trump granted pardon to Mr. McMahon,” Lustberg wrote in an email.
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Mustian reported from Natchitoches, Louisiana. AP reporter Eric Tucker contributed reporting from Washington.
