Forensic document examiners confirmed what online observers suspected: several presidential pardons posted to the Justice Department website in November 2025 carried signatures from President Donald Trump that were completely identical, down to every pen stroke. The department replaced them within hours, calling it a technical error.
The incident put Trump in an awkward position. For months, he has relentlessly attacked former President Joe Biden over autopen use, even replacing Biden’s official portrait in the White House with a photograph of the mechanical signing device.
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Handwriting Experts Verify Identical Signatures
The Justice Department posted pardons dated November 7, 2025, for three individuals: former baseball player Darryl Strawberry, former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada, and former New York police sergeant Michael McMahon. Social media users noticed the signatures looked suspicious.
Two independent forensic analysts examined the documents for The Associated Press. Their conclusion was definitive: the signatures were identical.
Tom Vastrick, president of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners, reviewed the original images preserved on the Internet Archive. “No two signatures are going to bear the exact same design features in every aspect,” Vastrick told reporters. His examination confirmed the signatures matched perfectly, something that never occurs naturally in handwriting.
The Justice Department removed the original documents and posted new versions with different signatures. The replacements appeared online by November 15, 2025.
Administration Blames Staffing Problems
Justice Department spokesperson Chad Gilmartin said the agency made “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.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson insisted Trump “signed each one of these pardons by hand as he does with all pardons.” She told reporters the media should investigate Biden’s autopen use instead of covering “a non-story.”
Neither the Justice Department nor the White House explained how a single hand-signed document could have been uploaded to three separate pardon files, or why the error occurred specifically with these November 7 pardons.
The Three Pardons
Glen Casada was convicted of running a fraud scheme involving Tennessee’s legislative postage program. He and a former aide created a shell company called Phoenix Solutions, steering lawmakers’ mail business to it in exchange for kickbacks. U.S. District Judge Eli Richardson, a Trump appointee and former FBI agent, sentenced Casada to three years in September 2025. He had already resigned as House speaker during a sexting scandal.
Darryl Strawberry, the 1983 National League Rookie of the Year, served time in the 1990s for tax evasion and drug charges. Trump cited his religious conversion and sobriety when granting the pardon.
Michael McMahon received 18 months in spring 2025 for acting as a Chinese agent. Federal prosecutors said he tried to intimidate a former Chinese official into returning to his homeland. His attorney, Lawrence Lustberg, told reporters he learned about the signature replacement from a journalist’s phone call.
Pardons Remain Valid Despite Signature Questions
Frank Bowman, a legal historian at the University of Missouri School of Law writing a book on presidential pardons, said the signature method has no bearing on validity. “The key to pardon validity is whether the president intended to grant the pardon,” Bowman explained.
He called any re-signing “an obvious, and rather silly, effort to avoid comparison to Biden.”
The Constitution gives presidents broad pardon power. Courts have consistently ruled that presidential intent matters, not signature mechanics. None of the three pardon recipients challenged the documents or questioned their legitimacy.
Trump’s Year-Long Campaign Against Biden’s Autopen
The signature incident occurred during Trump’s sustained attack on Biden’s autopen use.
In June 2025, Trump issued a presidential memorandum ordering an investigation into Biden’s “cognitive decline” and autopen use. The memo directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine whether Biden aides “conspired to deceive the public” about his mental state.
Trump created the “Presidential Walk of Fame” along the White House colonnade in September 2025. Instead of Biden’s portrait, Trump hung a framed photograph of an autopen machine.
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee released a 100-page report on October 28, 2025, titled “The Biden Autopen Presidency: Decline, Delusion, and Deception in the White House.” Chairman James Comer urged Bondi to review all Biden executive actions and declared any autopen-signed documents “null and void” without proper authorization.
Trump posted on Truth Social in late November 2025 that all Biden documents signed by autopen were “hereby null, void, and of no further force or effect.”
In December 2025, Trump added partisan plaques to the Walk of Fame. Biden’s plaque calls him “by far, the worst President in American History” and claims he “took office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen.”
Biden defended his autopen use in a July interview with The New York Times. “The autopen is legal. As you know, other presidents used it, including Trump,” Biden said. He noted he used the device because “we’re talking about a whole lot of people” when discussing his record number of pardons and commutations.
Presidents Have Used Autopens for Decades
Trump himself has acknowledged using an autopen. “I never use it,” he told reporters on Air Force One in March 2025, before qualifying: “I mean, we may use it, as an example, to send some young person a letter, because it’s nice. But to sign pardons and all of the things that Biden signed with an autopen is disgraceful.”
President Barack Obama faced similar scrutiny in 2011 for using an autopen to sign the Patriot Act extension. A 2005 Justice Department memo concluded presidents may direct subordinates to affix their signature after making the decision to sign, though they cannot delegate the decision itself.
Jeffrey Crouch, an American University professor specializing in executive clemency, told reporters that “other presidents have used autopen to grant pardons.”
What the Signature Swap Reveals
The Justice Department’s quiet replacement of identical Trump signatures on recent pardons exposed the contradiction at the center of Trump’s autopen campaign. While attacking Biden’s mechanical signatures as potentially fraudulent, the administration posted pardon documents with signatures so identical they violated basic principles of handwriting analysis.
The original documents remain accessible only through the Internet Archive. The Justice Department has not explained why identical signatures appeared on multiple pardons, how the supposed uploading error occurred, or why staff didn’t catch the problem before publication.
Bondi said her Justice Department team “has already initiated a review” of Biden’s autopen use for pardons. She has not announced any review of the November 7, 2025, Trump pardons that required signature replacement.
