Eric Boehlert: How Trump gets away with shredding everything

[babylonsister]

How Trump gets away with shredding everything
The consummate bully
Eric Boehlert
2 hr ago


snip//

What Trump has done since he first arrived in Washington, D.C., in January 2017 was shred longstanding Beltway protocols; traditions that for decades and sometimes centuries were based on a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ on the proper way to behave and the ethical course that should be followed while running the government. The consummate bully and liar, Trump didn’t care about any of those rules and began obliterating them immediately. He flooded the zone with crass, outlandish and destructive behavior, which the press tried to keep pace with at first. Shattering Beltway protocols used to carry a penalty, which was handed out by the press.

Eventually, as the years passed, news outlets mostly gave up, especially with the day-to-day transgressions, adopting a Trump-being-Trump view of his chronic rule breaking. Beltway institutions, particularly within the federal government, embraced the same mealy-mouthed approach, which gave Trump the okay to trample norms. “He didn’t think the rules applied to him,” a former White House aide told CNN this week. And he was right.

That’s why he packed up 15 boxes of presidential documents, some of them marked “top secret,” and shipped them off to Mar-a-lago, even though all the contents should have been sent to the National Archives, because the Presidential Records Act requires that all records created by presidents be turned over at the end of their administrations. Previously, Trump spent years destroying presidential documents, which is not allowed by law.

The whole story revolved around “the Trump administration flagrantly violating federal law by removing and destroying protected federal records,” as Media Matters noted. But that’s not how it got played in the press this week.

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https://pressrun.media/p/how-trump-gets-away-with-shredding

[dalton99a]

1. Illegally, not Improperly

Look at the Times’ ridiculously gentle headline, “Trump Gives Documents Improperly Taken From White House to Archives.” [Emphasis added.] Even before reading the article, news consumers are tipped off that this wasn’t a major infraction by Trump; it wasn’t a criminal act because he gave back the documents that were “improperly taken.” Fact: Trump did not simply “hand over” the documents, as the Times suggested in the article. He turned them over after his lawyers negotiated for months with the National Archives.

At the top of the article, the Times stressed that 15 boxes were taken (illegally) because of the “hasty exit” Trump made from the White House, and because aides were “preoccupied” in January 2021. What does “hasty exit” even mean? Like every other president whose time in the White House ends, Trump was given ten weeks notice from the time of the November election to the time the new president was sworn in. There was nothing “hasty” about the transition.

The Times’ ho-hum coverage took a strange turn on Thursday when Axios reported Maggie Haberman’s upcoming Trump book reports that “staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper.” That’s weird because two days earlier it was Haberman who wrote the Times story suggesting Trump taking 15 boxes home with him was an honest mistake — yet she knew he was likely flushing documents down the toilet while he was president? Why wasn’t that crucial information included in the Times’ Archives reporting? And if Haberman knew that, why did she allow Trump aides to spin the story this week as nothing more than a bureaucratic misunderstanding?

When the Archives story progressed after it was learned that classified documents had been found within the 15 boxes, the Times ran that update on page 15, not page 1, once again signaling the news wasn’t especially important.

That’s how Trump gets away with shredding everything.