The “But Her Emails” crowd has been noticeably silent recently as reports mount about Donald Trump’s incredible mishandling of official documents, including some classified docs.
According to the Washington Post, The National Archives and Records Administration has asked the Justice Department to investigate Trump’s handling of these documents, and whether it constituted a crime.
After entering the White House, Trump never got over an old habit of ripping up documents after he was done reading them. This wasn’t a secret, but the House investigation into the January 6 Capitol attack apparently brought to light new information revealing the practice was way more widespread and problematic than anyone knew, to the point that staff had to come up with “special practices” to deal with the paper fragments Trump would leave in trash cans, on the floor of Air Force One, and elsewhere.
The New York Times‘ Maggie Haberman has become only the most recent person to have sat on important information about the misdeeds of the Trump White House in order to sell a book, as she revealed Thursday that Trump would reportedly regularly clog the White House toilets with big clumps of these torn-up documents.
Trump may have begun tearing up documents when he was just a corrupt businessman, but that doesn’t make the practice acceptable for a president to continue. According to these reports, two different chiefs of staff told Trump he had to stop because it was a violation of the Presidential Records Act, which requires all written communications related to a president’s official duties to be preserved.
Trump’s staff reportedly had to get creative in figuring out how to deal with his mishandling of documents. Sometimes they would brief him of their contents but not leave the papers with him (which is apparently unusual). Some of the documents from his tenure that were turned over to the National Archives had been torn up and taped back together.
On top of all of this, 15 boxes of documents were found at Trump’s “summer residence”/private home and resort Mar-a-Lago. These reportedly included classified documents, as well as some of Trump’s greatest hits.
From the Post:
The materials they recovered included correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that Trump once described as “love letters,” as well as a letter left for Trump by President Barack Obama, people familiar with the matter said. The National Archives also retrieved a map of Hurricane Dorian that had been altered with a black marker by Trump in a failed attempt to show he had not been wrong about the storm’s path, according to a person familiar with the contents of the boxes. The Archives in a statement earlier this week said Trump representatives were “continuing to search” for additional records.
While the maximum sentence for destroying records with willful intent is three years, it does not sound like Trump is likely to be convicted of any crime, thanks to a “toothless” inability to actually enforce the existing law. Still, the silence from everyone who demanded Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for deleting emails is glaring, and also completely unsurprising given its total, eternally transparent hypocrisy.
(image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
