Former President Donald Trump would rip up documents and throw them on the floor after reading them, a former White House valet told the January 6 House committee.
His testimony points to possible document destruction by Trump when he was still president. It is illegal under the Presidential Records Act for a president to destroy official records as the form part of the national archive. Trump is already awaiting trial on charges of hoarding presidential documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
In newly released and heavily redacted testimony, the employee told the committee on June 10, 2022, that Trump habitually destroyed documents after reading them. When a committee member asked: “Do you remember the president ever tearing up or destroying documents that he had seen?” the employee replied: “That’s typically what he would do once he’s finished with a document. He would tear everything, tear newspapers, tear photos.”
He added: “He liked to look at pictures and he would just tear it once he’s done looking at it and just throw it on the floor.”
Pretty sure I remember articles about him clogging toilets with ripped up paper.
And that archivists followed him around collecting scraps.
But a lot of ridiculous shit has happened since
You can still clog a toilet with documents after eating them…
“After [Trump fixer] Michael Cohen left the office and I walked into the Oval, Donald, in my view, was chewing what he had just torn up,” she told MSNBC. “It was very bizarre because he is a germophobe he never puts paper in his mouth.”
I love how Omarosa thought eating paper was only weird because he was a germaphobe tho
That makes me wonder if he started doing the ripping thing to distract from specific documents he needed to destroy to stay out of prison and make people think he just ripped up everything after he read it. And didn’t realize that ripping everything could also land him in prison.
And that archivists followed him around collecting scraps.
I’m as anti-Trump as anybody and I’d be perfectly happy for that fat fascist fuck to spend the rest of his existence in solitary in Leavenworth just for even attempting to destroy presidential records…
…but in the 21st century, why is shit like “follow[ing] him around collecting scraps” necessary? (Or on a related note, why do they think retrieving papers from Mar-a-lago long after the fact makes them secure?) Have they somehow never heard of photocopiers and printers or something? All of these articles are written as if these pieces of paper are unique and irreplaceable, and that just doesn’t make sense.
When you’re the president, you get your documents served up however you damn well please. While it may seem ridiculous on the surface, it is much better to have information delivered to the president in a format that he/she is comfortable with rather than having valuable seconds wasted in a crisis because Donny or Joe doesn’t know how to get their PDF window open again.
Furthermore, new technologies often introduce new vulnerabilities. Keeping things old school is actually a relatively effective security technique.
Basically, presidents are usually creatures of their time, and that time is often prehistoric.
That’s not at all what I was saying. I have no problem with the notion of them printing out stuff on paper for the president to read. The thing that doesn’t make sense to me is why they can’t just print two copies so he can rip one up and they’ll still have the other to archive (or why they can’t just archive the electronic copy, or whatever).
