Trump Faces Accusations of Using Autopen on Recent Pardons After Criticizing Biden for the Same Thing

President Donald Trump has spent months slamming his predecessor, Joe Biden, over the use of an autopen—a machine that replicates a signature—for official documents, including pardons. He even went as far as calling for those Biden actions to be invalidated and famously swapped out Biden’s portrait in a White House display with a photo of an autopen machine.

But now, it looks like Trump might have run into a similar issue himself with a batch of pardons issued earlier this month.

On November 7, Trump granted pardons to several people, including former New York Mets star Darryl Strawberry (for old tax evasion and drug convictions), ex-Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada (convicted in a corruption case), and retired NYPD sergeant Michael McMahon (sentenced for acting as an unregistered agent in a Chinese repression operation), among others.

Shortly after the Justice Department posted these pardon documents online, sharp-eyed observers noticed something odd: the president’s signatures on multiple pardons looked exactly the same—down to every loop and stroke. Two forensic document examiners told the Associated Press that the signatures were identical, which is a classic sign of an autopen or copied image rather than natural hand-signed variations.

Not long after the buzz started online, the DOJ quietly swapped out the documents with new versions featuring slightly different signatures on each one.

A DOJ spokesperson, Chad Gilmartin, brushed it off as a simple “technical error.” He explained that one hand-signed version got accidentally uploaded multiple times due to staffing hiccups. “There’s really nothing here,” he added, insisting Trump personally signed all seven pardons by hand, and the site now shows unique signatures for each.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson echoed that, saying in an email: “President Trump signed every one of these pardons himself, just like he always does with pardons.” She suggested the press should focus instead on digging into Biden’s alleged heavy reliance on the autopen, calling this whole thing a “non-story.”

It’s worth noting that autopens have been used by presidents for decades without any legal issues—experts say it doesn’t affect the validity of a pardon as long as the president authorized it. Still, the irony hasn’t been lost on some, given how much Trump hammered Biden on this exact topic.