The first thing I read this morning was this:
While President Trump was in office, staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper, Maggie Haberman scoops in her forthcoming book, “Confidence Man.”
Of course he did. One, because he was a spoiled brat and probably never got punished for flooding the bathroom, so he never learned that some things don’t flush. And two, because he had a lot to hide.
A couple of years ago he was going on about how toilets don’t flush any more at his rallies. At the time, people assumed he resented government water-saving regulations. But I guess if he was trying to flush documents he probably did need to flush ten times. More, even. The White House custodial staff must have been glad to see him go.
So Trump ripped up documents that had to be taped back together to be preserved, and in some cases what the National Archives sent to the January 6 committee was just paper bits that hadn’t been re-assembled. I believe some time back I wrote about Trump’s poor staff having to scotch tape papers together after he’d ripped them up, but I can’t find the post now. Then the Archives had to retrieve 15 boxes of White House documents, including the love letters from Kim Jong Un and the famous Sharpied hurricane map, from Mar-a-Lago.
The map definitely needs to be in the Trump Presidential Library, if it’s ever built.
Trump’s representatives — the Mar-a-Lago staff, I assume — said they “are continuing to search for additional presidential records that belong to the National Archives,” the Archives said in a statement. There are reports that some of the documents Trump removed from the White House and took to Florida may have been classified. An inspector general in the Justice Department is supposed to be looking into this.
And it’s known he took a scale model of a redesign for Air Force One from the Oval Office to display in Mar-a-Lago. I think the White House staff needs to audit the art and the silverware.
And, of course, Trump was advised multiple times about the Presidential Records Act and why he couldn’t destroy documents, but he did it, anyway. This tells us he can’t change. He probably even was told as a child not to flush random things down the toilet and clog it up, but he won’t do as he’s told, probably because he’s a sociopath and he’s never had to do as he’s told.
Could Trump be prosecuted for violating the Presidential Records Act? I take it this has not happened before, although it’s never been so flagrantly violated before. Per Peter Weber in The Week:
Trump’s repeated ripping up of documents “is against the law, but the problem is that the Presidential Records Act, as written, does not have any real enforcement mechanism,” James Grossman at the American Historical Association tells the Post. One Archives official described the Presidential Records Act as functionally a “gentlemen’s agreement.”
“You can’t prosecute for just tearing up papers,” Charles Tiefer, former House counsel, tells the Post. “You would have to show [Trump] being highly selective and have evidence that he wanted to behave unlawfully.”
Trump routinely ripped up papers throughout his presidency, despite repeated warnings from lawyers and two chiefs of staff that he was violating the Presidential Records Act, the Post reports, citing 11 former Trump aides and associates. “He didn’t want a record of anything,” one former senior Trump official said. “He never stopped ripping things up. Do you really think Trump is going to care about the records act? Come on.”
While Trump was still president the citizens’ watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a suit challenging the use of encrypted messaging apps among the Trump White House staff, which was a lot skeezier than anything Hillary Clinton did with the damn emails. CREW said the messaging apps violated the Presidential Records Act, since there was no record kept of the messages. Other groups filed similar suits when it was learned Trump was not keeping records of meetings and phone calls with foreign leaders — especially Vladimir Putin — and also that he was ripping some documents up. The cases were all dismissed by various courts; I don’t believe any are still pending. As I understand it, the various courts ruled that the Presidential Records Act is a rare thing that can’t be enforced through a court. Congress or the Justice Dpeartment would have to get involved, I believe.
But we also learned that the White House phone records received by the January 6 committee from the National Archives have gaps during times it is known Trump was on a phone.
The call logs obtained by the committee document who was calling the White House switchboard, and any calls that were being made from the White House to others. Mr. Trump had a habit throughout his presidency of circumventing that system, making it far more difficult to discern with whom he was communicating.
This really cannot be allowed to stand.
Elsewhere in Trump World — the Derp abides. I got a kick out of this Lawrence O’Donnell sequence calling out the relentless stupidity of Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Trumpers.