Newly revealed photographs reveal two occasions when former President Donald Trump apparently flushed documents down the toilet.
Maggie Haberman, New York Times reporter and contributor to CNN is publishing the new images in their upcoming book, “Confidence Man,” and the images were previously posted by Axios.
THE CNN previously reported how Trump flouted presidential record-keeping laws and often tore up documents, drafts, and memos after reading them.
He would periodically flush papers down the toilet at the White House residence – only to be discovered later when repairmen were called in to fix the clogged toilets. Trump has denied the allegations and, in a statement given to Axios on Monday, a spokesperson said the report on the practice was fabricated.
In the images revealed on Monday, it’s unclear what the documents refer to — and who wrote them — but they appear to be written in Trump’s handwriting in black marker. Haberman said one image is of a White House bathroom and the other is of a trip abroad that was provided to her by a Trump White House source.
“Who knows what this newspaper was? Only he would know and presumably who was handling it, but the important point is about the records,” Haberman told John Berman and Brianna Keilar of CNN on the “New Day” this Monday morning.
Trump had a pattern of disregarding normal record preservation procedures. On one occasion, Trump asked if anyone wanted to put up a copy of a speech he had just put up for auction on eBay during a mid-flight visit to the press cabin of Air Force One.
In other cases, Trump tasked aides with carrying boxes of unread memos, articles and drafts of tweets aboard the presidential plane for him to review and then rip to shreds.
A former senior Trump administration official said a deputy in the Office of the Secretary of General Staff often comes in to take things out of the trash and take them off Trump’s desk after he leaves a room.
A former White House official recalled that while document preservation was a key responsibility of the staff secretary, the rest of Trump’s senior staff had no sense of their obligation to keep records of documents passing through the West Wing.
Trump’s random record keeping was the subject of a protracted feud earlier this year between him and the National Archives. The Justice Department is investigating the matter.
Source: CNN Brasil
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