President Donald Trump is facing new scrutiny over the use of a replicated signature on several recent pardons.

The Justice Department posted pardons online bearing identical copies of 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.

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
      85·
      1 day ago

      The first president to use the autopen extensively was Thomas Jefferson. … Since Jefferson, various US presidents have made use of the autopen; some were guarded about it while others were more open about its use. Whereas once the official White House position was to deny the existence or usage of the autopen, today its existence is more of an open secret.

      Harry Truman was rumored to make use of the device; Gerald Ford was open about his utilization of the autopen, but it was Lyndon B. Johnson who blew the doors off the entire affair by allowing the device to be photographed in the White House, appearing on the cover of The National Enquirer with the article “The Robot That Sits in for the President.”

      John F. Kennedy was so dependent on the autopen, that he became the subject of a book entitled The Robot That Helped to Make a President.

      But when Biden uses it, it’s a scandal, and when Trump duplicates his signatures it’s perfectly fine. Good old Republican hypocrisy.

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        3·
        5 hours ago

        They know all of this. They harped on the Biden autopen thing to normalize exactly what we are reading about right now.

        “Biden got away with it, so we can do it too.”