The Supervisory Committee of the House of Representatives announced Thursday, February 10 the opening of an investigation for “potential serious violationsof the Presidential Records Act. Its chairman, Democrat Carolyn Maloney, said to herself “extremely concerned“by the practices of the former real estate mogul.
We already know the episode of the 15 boxes that Donald Trump had taken with him as a souvenir to his villa in Florida, when he should have left them in the National Archives when he left. These documents, some of which are stamped defense secret, ended up being seized in January, after a standoff of several months with the former head of state.
We also know how casually the 45th American president sometimes treated official documents that he tore up, crumpled or threw in a ball… his assistants sometimes had to patch them up with tape to save them!
The latest revelation is not going to help her restore her image: in a book to be published in October, excerpts of which have been revealed by Axios, a journalist from the New York Times, Maggie Haberman, assures that Donald Trump is strongly suspected of having regularly thrown bundles of papers in the toilets … and that he flushed to get rid of them. Except it didn’t always work. White House staff were called in to unclog the toilet. This happened even when the president was traveling abroad.
Plumbing and politics: According to this star NYT journalist, during Trump’s term, the White House toilets had to be unclogged regularly, blocked by sheets of printed paper 1/2 https://t.co/uSmxknRclm
— Aurelia End (@AureliaEndAFP) February 10, 2022
Donald Trump, already worried about the management of his taxes and the way he would have tried to stay in power after his defeat in November 2020, seeks to minimize, but still felt obliged on Thursday to publish a press release in which he assures that his exchanges with the National Archives have always been “respectful” and “collaborative“. He also claims to have never thrown anything official down the toilet. He even promised to exhibit several documents in his future presidential library.
Except that the former president did not only have a problem with the papers: he also had some with his phone. This was discovered by the commission of inquiry working on the attack on the capitol on January 6, 2021. To reconstruct its schedule, establish what Donald Trump was doing and saying behind closed doors during these critical hours when her supporters were invading the building, she wanted to peel her phone calls.
And there surprise: there are holes in the official records, a large number of phone calls are missing from the list. Exchanges that the president nevertheless had with Republican parliamentarians, like the leader of the minority in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy or like Senator Tommy Tuberville. They themselves spoke about it publicly, these conversations took place, there is no doubt. Except that there is no trace of it in the White House documents.
Either Donald Trump used his personal telephones or those of his assistants (which he did quite often despite the warnings of his security services), or the records of the recordings were modified with a desire to hide. For the moment no track is more privileged than another.
Democrats don’t shy away from talking.”of hypocrisy“. They recall that when Hillary Clinton used a private email server while she was Secretary of State, Trump called the practice “worse than Watergate“.
Remind me. What was “lock her up” thing about again?
Trump administrations have all had some Presidential Records Act violations, including the use of unofficial email,telephone accounts as well as destruction of e-mails & documents
Will justice ever be served?
Trump’s America pic.twitter.com/YdWKjYyZFR
— Alicia Smith #FBR (@AliciaSmith987) February 8, 2022
He had widely used it to discredit her during his campaign for the presidential election. The Republicans, this time, remain remarkably quiet. Others also remember that under his tenure, in 2017, the government secretly obtained the phone records of journalists from washington post who were writing about accusations of Russian interference in the election the previous year… These latest revelations illustrate in any case all the contempt that the former president felt vis-à-vis the rules and standards imposed by his status. So much so that it is a real challenge today to compile a reliable and complete historical file on his presidency.