The Justice Department recently rectified an online mishap concerning presidential pardons that initially displayed duplicate signatures of former President Donald Trump. This error, attributed to a “technical glitch,” was quietly amended by the department earlier this week.

After sparking online chatter, the administration swiftly updated the pardons with versions that displayed unique signatures. Officials assured the public that Trump had personally signed all the pardons dated November 7, attributing the mistake to “technical” and staffing challenges. They emphasized that this issue did not impact the legitimacy of the clemency actions.

This incident arises during a period of heightened clemency activity and follows Trump’s recent controversial pardon of crypto magnate Changpeng Zhao. In a 60 Minutes interview, Trump distanced himself from Zhao, labeling the legal proceedings as a “Biden witch hunt.”

Tom Vastrick, a handwriting specialist and president of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners, remarked, “A fundamental principle in handwriting analysis is that no two signatures will be identical in every detail.”

Vastrick, who scrutinized the initial identical signatures and their replacements at the request of the Associated Press, described the examination as “very straightforward.” These original images are now only accessible via the Internet Archive.

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.