In the first day of this month, Donald TrumpHis efforts to conceal exactly what he did before, during, and after the January 6 attack on the Capitol were dealt a major blow when the Supreme Court rule that the House Uprising Inquiry Committee could obtain documents he desperately wanted to keep private and key. The panel has already begun receiving the files it has requested from the National Archives and will continue to do so in the coming weeks and months. That is clearly good news for justice, although less so, it turns out that some of the documents in question are going to be harder to check than one might hope, because Trump clearly has a habit of tearing apart the public eye. the president’s official business as a man knows he will one day have something to hide.
washington articles report that in an unlikely but entirely believable turn of events, “several Trump White House files” delivered to the committee on January 6 “were ripped apart and then glued back together,” according to people familiar with the matter. related to this issue. If your responses to that are “why,” “how,” and “what happens,” rest assured that you’re not alone. Despite the fact that the Presidential Records Act explicitly requires each administration to preserve everything from correspondence and handwritten notes to memos and other written communications relating to the official job of the then president, the 45th guy seems to have chosen to ignore that rule; instead, Trump regularly tearing up the documents, prompting White House officials to meticulously reconstruct the papers “like a jigsaw puzzle,” according to a 2018 Politico article, while some of the papers were simply plain. is “split in the middle”, the others “will be torn into pieces so small that they look like confetti.” (What happened on those days when he decided to shred the document into tiny tiny pieces? It’s unclear, but we’re guessing that on at least one recent occasion he’s been told that he’s can’t just buy danishand was then started.)
In a statement for Post, The National Archives confirmed that Trump’s White House records were turned over to congressional investigators “including paper records that were torn up by former President Trump.”
If Trump’s shredding routine strikes you as something that sounds like it should and might be illegal, you’re not alone. Constitutional Law Scholar Stephen Gillers Talk to Post that damaged documents are clearly government property and as such, “destroying them may be a crime under some statutes. The President does not own the records created by his administration. The definition of presidential profile is very broad. Trump’s own notes to himself may qualify, and their destruction could constitute criminal destruction of government property.”
Speaking of what we would call “unorthodox” behavior by a sitting president, The New York Times report that Trump is even more intimately involved in discussions about: confiscation of voting machines than previously thought.
Just a funny anecdote to keep people up at night as Trump suggest he could make another stab at the White House in 2024.
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