Donald Trump pursued every possible legal option to stop the National Archives from turning over his materials to the Jan. 6 committee, but it was a losing battle. After the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an emergency appeal from the former president two weeks ago, the Archives started providing records to congressional investigators, indifferent to the fact that Trump wanted to keep the documents under wraps.
Naturally, there’s considerable interest in the papers’ contents, and some recent reporting suggests the documents are producing provocative revelations. But as it turns out, there was a related question many of us didn’t think to ask: What was the literal, physical condition of the materials Trump tried to keep secret?
The Washington Post reported overnight:
When the National Archives and Records Administration handed over a trove of documents to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, some of the Trump White House records had been ripped up and then taped back together, according to three people familiar with the records.
In a bit of a surprise, the Archives actually confirmed the reporting, telling the Post that the Trump White House records sent to Congress “included paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump.”
To be sure, some of the papers were intact, but others had to be reconstructed with tape.
If this sounds at all familiar, there’s a good reason for that. As longtime readers may recall, under the Presidential Records Act, document preservation in the White House isn’t optional; it’s a legal requirement. Except, as Politico reported in June 2018, in the Trump White House, the then-president had a problem with the law.
Solomon Lartey spent the first five months of the Trump administration working in the Old Executive Office Building, standing over a desk with scraps of paper spread out in front of him. Lartey, who earned an annual salary of $65,969 as a records management analyst, was a career government official with close to 30 years under his belt. But he had never seen anything like this in any previous administration he had worked for. He had never had to tape the president’s papers back together again. Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, Lartey and his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, he said, “like a jigsaw puzzle.” Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.
The article added that Trump had an “enduring habit” of ripping up papers — he ignored pleas from aides to stop — which in the White House, meant there was an entire department dedicated to the task of retrieving the pieces, taping them back together again, and passing them along to the National Archives.
This became relevant anew exactly two years ago this week, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, after having listened to Trump’s State of the Union address, was seen tearing up her copy of the then-president’s remarks. The Republican insisted at the time that the California Democrat had committed a crime — a claim that was utterly insane — because presidential records had to remain intact.
The irony was overwhelming at the time, and it’s just a bit worse now.
It now appears, of course, that Trump’s habit of tearing up documents that were supposed to be preserved continued until the end of his term, and included materials of direct relevance to the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack. We’re nevertheless left with a specific question, for which there isn’t yet a clear answer:
Did the Republican tear up these specific papers as part of a habitual process, or was he eager to tear up these documents in the hopes of obscuring possible misdeeds?
