Leavitt Cites Funniest “Handwriting Experts” on Trump Signature
The White House press secretary will say just about anything to dismiss the Jeffrey Epstein story.

As the White House flailingly denies the authenticity of Donald Trump’s lewd 2003 birthday note to his then-friend Jeffrey Epstein, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is, apparently, just creating evidence out of whole cloth.
Since the letter was released Monday—as a result of the House Oversight Committee subpoenaing Epstein’s estate—Leavitt and other Trump spokespeople have sought to deny its veracity by arguing that the signature at its close doesn’t match Trump’s current handwriting.
In reality, examples abound of nearly identical signatures by Trump from around the time of the letter’s writing.
Nonetheless, Leavitt dug in her heels at a Tuesday press conference, where she even claimed to have brought receipts: “I have already seen many forensic analysts of signatures coming out. I believe it was The Daily Signal that published a piece with three separate signature analysts who said that this absolutely was not the president’s authentic signature,” the press secretary said.
No such Daily Signal story exists, as Matthew Gertz of Media Matters observed on X. Instead, Leavitt was likely thinking of an article by another conservative website, The Daily Wire. But even that story was a far cry from her description.
The Daily Wire, for instance, did not cite “three separate signature analysts,” It cited three “AI research systems”—which did not remark, at all, on Trump’s signature, but rather compared the diction in the 2003 letter to Trump’s other publicly available writings. The AI models apparently cast doubt on the note’s authenticity, finding it inconsistent with the president’s speech habits (namely, too “sophisticated” for Trump).
And the AI models’ conclusions are quite dubious. For example, although the AI systems flagged that the 2003 letter employs third-person narration, words like “enigma,” and a theatrical opening line (“There must be more to life than having everything”), these by no means prove Trump was not the author.
In July, when The Wall Street Journal first reported on the existence of the letter, Judd Legum of Popular Information showed that each of these elements of the letter are plausible Trumpisms. This is not to mention that The Daily Wire overlooks the fact that one’s verbiage varies depending on context.
The Daily Wire story, in other words, is quite thin gruel—failing in its desperate mission to prove the letter was faked (and certainly not proving that Trump’s signature was forged). It’s no wonder Leavitt had to invent an imaginary article instead.