WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department posted a pardon online with an identical copy of President Donald Trump’s signature, but quietly corrected it this week after what the agency called a “technical error.”
The switch came after online commenters pointed out striking similarities in the president’s signature in a series of pardons dated Nov. 7, including one granted to a former New York Mets player. Darryl Strawberryformer Tennessee House Speaker Glenn Casada and former New York Police Department Sergeant Michael McMahon. In fact, the signatures on several pardons originally uploaded to the Justice Department’s website were identical, two forensic documentation experts confirmed to The Associated Press.
Within hours of online speculation, the government replaced the copy of the pardon with a new one without the same signature. The newspaper claimed that President Trump, who mercilessly mocked his predecessor’s use of an autopen, originally signed the entire Nov. 7 pardon himself and blamed the mistake on “technical” and staffing issues, which had nothing to do with the effectiveness of the pardon action.
Questions about Trump’s signature emerged amid a new flurry of pardons, weeks after Trump claimed he didn’t even know the cryptocurrency billionaire Zhao Changpeng, whom he pardoned last month. In an interview with 60 Minutes, he said the incident was a “Biden witch hunt.”
“A fundamental axiom of handwriting identification science is that no two signatures can have exactly the same design features in every respect,” said Tom Bastrick, a Florida-based handwriting expert and president of the American Association of Problem Document Examiners.
“It’s very simple,” Bastrick said, comparing a seemingly identical image currently available only online through the Internet Archive to the replacement image requested by AP.
“The website was updated after a technical error that caused one of President Trump’s personally signed signatures to be incorrectly uploaded multiple times due to staffing issues associated with the Democratic shutdown,” Justice Department spokesman Chad Gilmartin said in a statement.
“There is no story other than the fact that President Trump hand-signed seven pardons and the Department of Justice posted those same seven pardons on its website with seven unique signatures,” Gilmartin said in a statement to The Associated Press, referring to the latest wave of pardons granted by President Trump in recent weeks.
White House press secretary Abigail Jackson said in an email that President Trump “signed this pardon by hand, as he does all of his pardons.”
“The media should be spending their time investigating Joe Biden’s countless self-written pardons instead of reporting anything but the story,” she wrote.
Trump has been an outspoken critic of Biden’s use of an autopen to conduct executive business, going so far as to display a photo of such a device in place of a portrait of his predecessor on Biden’s new Walk of Fame along the West Wing Colonnade. His Republican supporters in Congress issued the following statement last month: harsh criticism It ranked Biden’s “deteriorating” mental state during his term and the Democratic Party’s use of autopens as the “biggest scandal in American history.”
Republicans say the findings call into question everything Biden did while in office, and sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi urging a thorough investigation.
The House Oversight Committee found that “White House officials did not know who was operating the autopen, and its use was not adequately controlled or documented to prevent misuse.” “The Committee considers all executive acts signed by autopen to be invalid without appropriate, corresponding, and contemporaneous written authorization tracing back to the President’s own consent.”
On Friday, Republicans who control the committee released a statement calling Trump’s potential use of electronic signatures legal and distinguishing them from Biden’s.
But Rep. Dave Ming, a California Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, noted clear similarities to the original pardon proposal and laid out the Republican case against Biden in a statement to The Associated Press, saying, “As President Trump appears to be stalling, we need to better understand who is actually in charge of the White House,” and called for an investigation into the matter.
In any case, legal experts say the use of an autopen does not affect the validity of the pardon.
“The key to the effectiveness of a pardon is whether the president intended to grant it,” 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 would be a clear and rather foolish effort to avoid comparisons to Biden.”
Much of President Trump’s mercy political alliescampaign donors and fraudsters who claimed to be victims of a “weaponized” Justice Department. President Trump has largely abandoned a process previously overseen by apolitical officials at the Justice Department.
Casada, the disgraced former Republican speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, was sentenced to three years in prison in September. prison. He was previously convicted of conspiring with a former legislative aide to win taxpayer-funded postal services from state legislators who had previously forced Casada to resign amid a sexting scandal.
strawberry He was convicted of tax evasion and drug charges in the 1990s. In granting the pardon, President Trump cited his Christian faith and long history of sobriety, which led to his career as the National League Rookie of the Year in 1983.
Mr. 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 campaign of oppression.” He was convicted of trying to intimidate former officials into returning to their homeland and acting as a foreign agent for China.
Mr. McMahon’s attorney, Lawrence Rustberg, said he did not know the pardon document had been replaced until he was contacted by an Associated Press reporter on Friday.
“It was and remains our understanding that President Trump pardoned Mr. McMahon,” Rustberg wrote in an email.
___
Mustian reported from Natchitoches, Louisiana. Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed reporting from Washington.
