Justice Department quietly replaced ‘identical’ Trump
signatures on recent pardons
By JIM
MUSTIAN, BRIAN SLODYSKO and MATT
BROWN
Updated 7:51 PM CST,
November 14, 2025
WASHINGTON (AP) — The
Justice Department posted pardons online bearing identical copies of President
Donald Trump’s signature before quietly correcting them this week after what
the agency called a “technical error.”
The replacements came
after online commenters seized on striking similarities in the president’s
signature across a series of pardons dated Nov. 7, including those granted to
former New York Mets player Darryl Strawberry, former Tennessee House
speaker Glen Casada and former New York police sergeant Michael McMahon. In
fact, the signatures on several pardons initially uploaded to the Justice
Department’s website were identical, two forensic document experts confirmed to
The Associated Press.
Within hours of the online
speculation, the administration replaced copies of the pardons with new ones
that did not feature identical signatures. It insisted Trump, who mercilessly
mocked his predecessor’s use of an autopen, had originally signed all the Nov.
7 pardons himself and blamed “technical” and staffing issues for the error,
which has no bearing on the validity of the clemency actions.
The questions about
Trump’s signature come amid a new flurry of clemency and weeks after the
president claimed to not even know Changpeng Zhao, a crypto billionaire he
pardoned last month. He said in an interview with 60 Minutes that the case had
been “a Biden witch hunt.”
“A basic axiom of
handwriting identification science is that no two signatures are going to bear
the exact same design features in every aspect,” said Tom Vastrick, a
Florida-based handwriting expert who is president of the American Society of
Questioned Document Examiners.
“It’s very
straightforward,” said Vastrick, who compared the apparently identical images,
now only visible through the online Internet Archive, with the replacements at
AP’s request.
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 DOJ
posted those same seven pardons with seven unique signatures to our website,”
Gilmartin said in a statement to AP, 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 auto penned pardons, not
covering a non-story,” she wrote.
Trump has been an
outspoken critic of Biden’s use of the autopen to conduct executive business,
going as far as to display a picture of one such device in place of a portrait
of his predecessor in a new “Presidential Walk of Fame” he created along the West
Wing colonnade. His Republican allies in Congress last month released a blistering 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 U.S. history.”
The Republicans said their
findings cast doubt on all of Biden’s actions in office and sent a letter to
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.
But Rep. 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.”
Regardless, 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.”
Much of Trump’s mercy has
gone to political allies, campaign donors and
fraudsters who claimed they were victims of a “weaponized” Justice Department.
Trump has largely cast aside a process that historically has been overseen by
nonpolitical personnel at the Justice Department.
Casada, a disgraced former
Republican speaker of the Tennessee House, was sentenced in September to three
years in prison. He was 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. Trump cited the 1983 National League Rookie of
the Year’s post-career embrace of his Christian faith and longtime sobriety
when pardoning him.
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 campaign of transnational repression.”
He was convicted of acting as a foreign agent for China after he tried to scare
an ex-official into going back to his homeland.
McMahon’s defense
attorney, Lawrence Lustberg, said he was not aware the pardon documents had
been replaced until he was contacted Friday by an AP reporter.
“It is and has always been
our understanding that President Trump granted Mr. McMahon his pardon,”
Lustberg wrote in an email.
___
Mustian reported from
Natchitoches, Louisiana. AP reporter Eric Tucker contributed reporting from
Washington.