“Not an isolated incident,” Maggie Haberman of the New York Times tells CNN in promoting her upcoming book on Donald Trump, “Confidence Man.”
“I learned that staff in the White House residence would periodically find the toilet clogged … and what the engineer would find would be wads of … either notes or some other piece of paper that, you know, they believe [Trump] had thrown down the toilet.”
They could have been anything from Post-Its to notes he’d written himself. There’s no way of knowing.
That might account for the man’s obsession with toilets not flushing to his satisfaction, Axios observes:
Why it matters: The revelation by Haberman, whose coverage as a New York Times White House correspondent was followed obsessively by Trump, adds a vivid new dimension to his lapses in preserving government documents. Axios was provided an exclusive first look at some of her reporting.
Haberman reports Trump has told people that since leaving office, he has remained in contact with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — whose “love letters,” as Trump once called them, were among documents the National Archives retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.
Zoom out: The news of White House toilet-flushing comes as the National Archives has reportedly asked the Biden Justice Department to examine Trump’s handling of White House records, amid the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
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- The Washington Post reports that National Archives officials “suspected Trump had possibly violated laws concerning the handling of government documents.” The National Archives later retrieved 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago, The Post reported.
- Archives officials found possible classified material in the returned boxes, The New York Times learned.
While in office, the former president blithely flouted the Presidential Records Act, which required him to preserve written communications concerning his official duties.
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- Trump routinely tore up documents and after leaving office brought substantial written materials back to Mar-a-Lago.
- A Trump spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment about the plumbing matter.
Former White House adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman recounted to MSNBC this week something from her 2018 Trump White House book, “Unhinged.”
On a day Michael Cohen was leaving the Oval Office, she walked in and witnessed Trump chewing what he had just torn up.
“It was very bizarre because,” says Newman, “he is a germaphobe, he never puts paper in his mouth.”
Anecdotal, of course, but the anecdotes are piling up.
Some advisers were concerned about Trump’s many interviews with reporters as he tried to get ahead of forthcoming books on his presidency. But they felt Trump could not help himself. He tried to make each reporter feel as if they were getting “something special,” Mike Allen reported in June 2021. In a few cases, they did.
Haberman and the Times were often criticized for their unusual access to Trump and often softball interviews.
The Washington Post addressed the matter last week:
“It is against the law, but the problem is that the Presidential Records Act, as written, does not have any real enforcement mechanism,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. “It’s that sort of thing where there’s a law, but who has the authority to enforce the law, and the existing law is toothless.”
But while the Presidential Records Act may be toothless, concealment, destruction and misappropriation of govenment documents, including classified documents, are prosecutable in themselves. The question remains: Will the Department of Justice try to flush away evidence of those crimes by the Trump administration?
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