Donald Trump the Megathread part II - Mod Warning added to OP 10/1/26

I suspect that Roberts is only protecting his own neck and those of his cohort. If Trump were to set precedent by getting judges that don't agree with him impeached, then why couldn't a dem president down the line do the same and set their sights on the Supreme Court Justices,some of whom (cough, Thomas, cough) probably merit it already.

I’d be 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% sure that if I asked a typical Irish person with only a ‘ pass primary cert from a national/primary school’ at most about the outcome re those two pictures , they would clearly state that the Russians would would have him ‘wipe their a—e and have enough paper left over - from the one roll- to do it several times.

The GUY gets more unhinged day by day if the comments are true

Would are away out there . He actually is being played ‘ like a well tuned violin. The flow of the music flows ‘ swimmingly’ no breaks, no scratching and you just lye back and absorb it all in while the ‘world burns’ unbeknownst to you Mr Trump

It's a complicated topic. There are many different things claiming to be "digital signatures". Some are probably legally enforceable, and others are more doubtful. Just the other day, I renewed our dog license online, and the last step of it purported to be some kind of digital signature. But, there was no end to end audit trail linking me to whatever it was. So, I would doubt that would be legally enforceable. But, it was only a dog license …

I don’t know about the US, but here, the law only states that signatures can’t be held to be invalid simply because they are in digital form. That says nothing about the minimum standards for them or whether any particular digital signature would stand up in court.

Otoh, there are digital signature mechanisms with a more solid technical basis. Anything based on public key infrastructure, where people and organisations have to identify themselves up front and that fact is certified with electronic certificates etc. is more likely to be a valid digital signature.

The autopen is nothing like a digital signature though. It really is nothing more than a more sophisticated version of photocopying a signature and taping it to a document. It doesn’t address the question at all of whether the person whose signature was used, authorised or knew about it.

That said, the PBS article below does a good job of fact checking Trump’s claims, particularly with respect to the pardons. So long as Biden acknowledges that he actually did mean to pardon the people concerned that should assuage any concerns, largely because the constitution doesn’t require signatures on pardons at all. In fact the article gives examples of pardons being signed on behalf of presidents by others, which to me is a much more transparent way of doing business.

But, then the constitution does require signatures for legislation.

The legal opinion you mentioned (in the PBS article also) does address that point in a lot of detail, but from what I can see a lot of what it talks about is mechanisms where people can delegate signature authority to others in transparent ways (like powers of attorney) not really through simplistic signature copying schemes designed to make it look like the president actually did sign it himself.

Anyway, I’m not suggesting the opinion is wrong - just it’s another example of a surprising thing that this presidency has exposed.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-trumps-claim-that-biden-pardons-are-void-because-he-used-an-autopen