The Trump administration\u2019s clemency drive is coming under scrutiny after the justice department this week replaced pardons posted online that bore strikingly similar copies of Trump\u2019s signature with others that are distinctively variable.<\/p>\n
The corrections came after online commenters seized on the similarities in the president\u2019s signature granting \u201cfull and unconditional\u201d pardons to seven men, including to former New York Mets player Darryl Strawberry<\/a>, former Tennessee House speaker Glen Casada and former New York police sergeant Michael McMahon, on 7 November.<\/p>\n Administration officials have blamed \u201ctechnical\u201d errors and staffing issues for the apparent oversight and insisted to the Associated Press that Trump had originally signed all the pardons himself.<\/p>\n Chad Gilmartin, a justice department spokesperson, said the \u201cwebsite 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\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThere 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,\u201d Gilmartin said in a statement to the Associated Press, referring to the latest wave of clemency Trump has granted in recent weeks.<\/p>\n White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an email that Trump \u201csigned each one of these pardons by hand as he does with all pardons\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe media should spend their time investigating Joe Biden\u2019s countless autopenned pardons, not covering a non-story,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n The errors come after a sustained administration campaign to undermine the validity of pardons issued by Trump\u2019s 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<\/a> bearing his name.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s portrait in a new \u201cPresidential Walk of Fame\u201d he created along the West Wing colonnade with a picture of an autopen.<\/p>\n Asked last week if he had considered replacing that image with a portrait, Trump responded: \u201cNo, I don\u2019t think so.\u201d<\/p>\n Questions about Trump\u2019s signature come amid a new flurry of clemency orders<\/a>. Last month, Trump issued a pardon to Changpeng Zhao, later telling CBS News that he had \u201cno idea who he is\u201d but had been told that crypto-currency businessman was a victim of a \u201cwitch-hunt\u201d by the Biden administration.<\/p>\n Zhao, who is also known as \u201cCZ\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n \u201cA basic axiom of handwriting identification science is that no two signatures are going to bear the exact same design features in every aspect,\u201d Thomas Vastrick, a Florida-based handwriting expert and president of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners, told the AP.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very straightforward,\u201d Vastrick added.<\/p>\n Legal experts say the use of an autopen has no bearing on the validity of the pardons.<\/p>\n \u201cThe key to pardon validity is whether the president intended to grant the pardon,\u201d said Frank Bowman, a legal historian and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law who is writing a book on pardons. \u201cAny re-signing is an obvious, and rather silly, effort to avoid comparison to Biden.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to This Week in Trumpland<\/p>\n A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201ca campaign of transnational repression\u201d.<\/p>\n The justice department\u2019s replacement of Trump\u2019s signature on the pardon documents is unlikely to stall Republican\u2019s autopen trolling of Biden.<\/p>\n Last month, Republicans in Congress released a sharp critique of Biden\u2019s alleged \u201cdiminished faculties\u201d and mental state during his term that ranked the Democrat\u2019s use of the autopen among \u201cthe greatest scandals in US history\u201d.<\/p>\n