A Congressional document dump of Jeffrey Epstein files on Monday has created a certifiable public relations nightmare for the Trump administration, and its allies are currently scrambling for some sort of explanation as to why what looks a whole helluva lot like the President’s signature would be found on an alleged birthday letter included in the trove. On Tuesday, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee) offered up the latest excuse: some sort of conspiracy involving a signing machine called an autopen.
“We’ve seen autopen’s been used quite a bit by the Biden administration,” Burchett told CNN reporter Manu Raju, during a press conference. “I’ve never known Trump to be much of an artist either.”
“There’s a history of it,” Raju countered, referencing the history of Trump’s doodles that have since been shared across the internet.
“I just don’t buy it,” Burchett responded.
“You think someone may have just forged this?” the reporter asked.
“Yeah, somehow,” Burchett said. “It’s so easy to do.”
In earlier times, Republicans notably promoted conspiracy theories that President Biden was so demented by old age that his aides had used an autopen to sign off on important documents while he was in office. Therefore, anything he signed must be considered invalid, the theory goes.
Biden has acknowledged using autopen—just as many other presidents before him (including Obama) have done. In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld faced criticism for having used an autopen to sign condolence letters to soldiers who had been killed in the Iraq War. Now the autopen topic has proven useful again, apparently to preclude Trump from any sort of creepy association with the world’s most notorious sex criminal.
On Monday, the House Oversight Committee on Government Reform released a new bundle of documents related to dead billionaire sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. The bundle of docs is easily one of the creepiest, most disturbing things ever publicly released by a government committee and reads like something straight out of True Detective. The internet subsequently lost its mind.
The documents are said to be from a “birthday book” that was given to Epstein on his 50th birthday by friends and colleagues. The “book,” which is 238 pages long, includes a broad variety of bizarre letters, drawings, and photographs. It includes personal details from different periods of the dead financier’s life—including pictures of Epstein as a child, and records from his employment as a high school teacher.
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