Questions arise over strikingly similar signatures by Trump on recent pardons

The Trump administration's clemency drive is coming under scrutiny after the justice department this week replaced pardons posted online that bore strikingly similar copies of Trump's signature with others that are distinctively variable, Report informs referring to The Guardian.

The corrections came after online commenters seized on the similarities in the president's signature granting "full and unconditional" pardons to seven men, including to former New York Mets player Darryl Strawberry, former Tennessee House speaker Glen Casada and former New York police sergeant Michael McMahon, on November 7.

Administration officials have blamed "technical" errors and staffing issues for the apparent oversight and insisted to the Associated Press that Trump had originally signed all the pardons himself.

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 [the Department of Justice] posted those same seven pardons with seven unique signatures to our website," Gilmartin said in a statement to the Associated Press, 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 autopenned pardons, not covering a non-story," she wrote.

The errors come after a sustained administration campaign to undermine the validity of pardons issued by Trump's 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 bearing his name.