A retired FBI agent who spent nearly three decades analyzing handwriting for the bureau is raising serious doubts about a signature attributed to President Donald Trump in a birthday book for Jeffrey Epstein.
Wayne Barnes, considered one of the nation’s leading signature experts, examined the signature after the House Oversight Committee released a photocopy of a page from Epstein’s 50th birthday book dating to the early 2000s.
Democrats seized on the release, though Trump has denied writing or signing the page, which included a sexually suggestive message printed over a sketch of a woman’s body.
Barnes told Just the News that the document raised questions of authenticity, pointing to inconsistencies in the type of paper and Trump’s established practices for correspondence.
“Whoever created the dialogue page seems to have put a good deal of thought into it, but something was overlooked,” Barnes wrote in his report.
According to his analysis, Trump’s personal letters signed with only his first name were almost always written on off-white or beige paper.
The Epstein birthday page, however, is on white paper.
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“That means that if someone cut out an appliqué of the ‘Donald’ signature and tried to affix (paste or tape) it to a piece of white paper, the difference in color around the ‘Donald’ would stand out,” Barnes explained.
“So, the colored paper had to be photocopied onto a white page, so the trimming around the signature could take place and not be observed because of a different tone of the paper.”
Barnes concluded that the format of the birthday page did not match Trump’s history of correspondence.
“Mr. Trump’s standard is colored paper which, it is highly likely he would have used for any outgoing letter, no matter the recipient,” he said.
He added that it was unlikely Trump would have signed the stylized dialogue page at all.
While Barnes said he would prefer to analyze the original page rather than a photocopy, he wrote that “the evidence in the public realm gives significant doubt Trump personally signed the Epstein letter.”
He clarified that the signature itself resembled Trump’s informal first-name style but said that did not prove Trump signed the entire page.
“This is not a case of a thumbs-up or thumbs-down determination whether the first-name signature of Donald Trump on the single page of Jeffery Epstein’s 50th Birthday Book is his signature. It is much more complex,” Barnes said.
In his report, Barnes distinguished between a forged signature and what he believes occurred here.
“The present case is an issue of someone applying another’s name to a place the named individual did not, or would not sign, of his own volition,” he wrote.
“That is, it is not a ‘forged signature,’ but rather a ‘fraudulent signature.’”
Barnes’ credentials include years of service during the Cold War, where he unmasked Soviet spies using signature analysis.
He now works as a private investigator in Florida and continues to testify as an expert witness in handwriting cases.
The former agent previously verified the authenticity of a signature tied to Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which was signed “R.H. Biden.”
Barnes matched the signature to official government documents belonging to Hunter Biden.
The FBI later confirmed the receipt and laptop were authentic, contrary to initial claims that the laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
Barnes also noted that Trump has said he distanced himself from Epstein in the 1990s, which makes it unlikely he would have sent a birthday greeting in 2003.
In addition, Trump’s personal letters typically included a brief, handwritten note of congratulations or thanks, which is absent from the page in question.
“If Mr. Trump really wanted to send a birthday greeting to Epstein, it would have been a single paragraph in a formal letter, maybe with a personal word or two written out, and then a first-name signature,” Barnes explained.
“There is absolutely nothing in his correspondence history that smacks of anything even remotely similar to the dialogue page.”
Barnes concluded that both the content of the page and the inconsistencies with Trump’s writing practices cast strong doubt on the authenticity of the signature, though he emphasized that further analysis of the original document would provide more definitive answers.
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