Trump's document destruction isn't something to paper over or shrug off
An enduring mystery might finally have been solved. Remember when Donald Trump ranted about how “people are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once,” and nobody knew what on earth he was talking about? Maybe he was referring to personal difficulties in trying to flush away official White House documents.
A forthcoming book by New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman, who covered Trump’s White House, reports that staff in the upstairs residence repeatedly found one of the toilets clogged with wads of printed paper. Trump issued a statement Thursday denying any and all document-flushing. But given what else we know about how he handled official paperwork — which belongs to the nation, not to him — I’m inclined to believe Haberman’s version of events.
From reporting in The Post, we learned this week that the National Archives and Records Administration had to recover 15 boxes of documents that Trump wrongly took with him to Mar-a-Lago, rather than sending them to the agency as required by law. From the Times, we learned that there may have been some classified material in those purloined documents. And now the National Archives and Records Administration has asked the Justice Department to investigate the matter.
We also know that some of the documents Trump did send to the Archives when he left office were pieced together with tape because of Trump’s habit of ripping up papers by hand when he finished with them — despite having been repeatedly warned, including by his chiefs of staff, that federal law required all those materials to be preserved. As Politico first reported in 2018, aides constantly had to fish torn bits of paper out of wastebaskets and painstakingly reassemble them.
“People who have nothing to hide don’t … destroy evidence to keep it from being publicly archived as required under federal law.” That’s not me talking; that’s what Trump himself said at a campaign rally in 2016, as he railed about the earth-shattering importance of how Hillary Clinton had handled or mishandled her emails.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/10/trump-torn-documents-archives-toilet-congress-investigate-hearings/
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