The Trump administration’s clemency drive is coming under scrutiny after the justice department this week replaced pardons posted online that bore strikingly similar copies of Trump’s signature with others that are distinctively variable.
The corrections came after online commenters seized on the similarities in the president’s signature granting “full and unconditional” pardons to seven men, including to former New York Mets player Darryl Strawberry, former Tennessee House speaker Glen Casada and former New York police sergeant Michael McMahon, on 7 November.
Administration officials have blamed “technical” errors and staffing issues for the apparent oversight and insisted to the Associated Press that Trump had originally signed all the pardons himself.
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 [the Department of Justice] posted those same seven pardons with seven unique signatures to our website,” Gilmartin said in a statement to the Associated Press, 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 autopenned pardons, not covering a non-story,” she wrote.
The errors come after a sustained administration campaign to undermine the validity of pardons issued by Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden that were in many cases signed by autopen. Trump has claimed that Biden was not aware of the signatures on orders and pardons bearing his name.
Trump, who typically makes an elaborate show of signing executive orders with a Sharpie at afternoon press calls, has gone so far as to replace Biden’s portrait in a new “Presidential Walk of Fame” he created along the West Wing colonnade with a picture of an autopen.
Asked last week if he had considered replacing that image with a portrait, Trump responded: “No, I don’t think so.”
Questions about Trump’s signature come amid a new flurry of clemency orders. Last month, Trump issued a pardon to Changpeng Zhao, later telling CBS News that he had “no idea who he is” but had been told that crypto-currency businessman was a victim of a “witch-hunt” by the Biden administration.
Zhao, who is also known as “CZ”, pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering in 2023. He served four months in prison and agreed to step down as the chief executive of Binance, the crypto exchange he co-founded.
“A basic axiom of handwriting identification science is that no two signatures are going to bear the exact same design features in every aspect,” Thomas Vastrick, a Florida-based handwriting expert and president of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners, told the AP.
“It’s very straightforward,” Vastrick added.
Legal experts say the use of an autopen has no bearing on the validity of the pardons.
“The key to pardon validity is whether the president intended 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 rather silly, effort to avoid comparison to Biden.”
The pardons issued by Trump earlier this month include Casada, a disgraced former Republican speaker of the Tennessee house who was sentenced in September to three years in prison after being convicted of working with a former legislative aide to win taxpayer-funded mail business from state lawmakers who previously drove Casada from office amid a sexting scandal.
Strawberry was convicted in the 1990s of tax evasion and drug charges. McMahon was sentenced to 18 months in prison earlier this year for his role in what a federal judge called “a campaign of transnational repression”.
The justice department’s replacement of Trump’s signature on the pardon documents is unlikely to stall Republican’s autopen trolling of Biden.
Last month, Republicans in Congress released a sharp 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 US history”.
The Republicans said their findings cast doubt on all of Biden’s actions in office and sent a letter to the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, urging a full investigation.
“Senior White House officials did not know who operated the autopen and its use was not sufficiently controlled or documented to prevent abuse,” the House oversight committee found. “The committee deems void all executive actions signed by the autopen without proper, corresponding, contemporaneous, written approval traceable to the president’s own consent.”
On Friday, Republicans who control the committee released a statement that characterized Trump’s potential use of an electronic signature as legitimate, which it distinguished from Biden’s.
Dave Min, a California Democrat on the House oversight committee, seized on the apparent similarities in the initial version of the pardons and called for an investigation of the matter, deploying the Republican arguments against Biden in a statement to AP that “we need to better understand who is actually in charge of the White House, because Trump seems to be slipping”.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
