WASHINGTON | Did Donald Trump flush official documents down the toilet? At a time when the management of the archives by the former president is debated in the United States, a new book of revelations, of which the Axios site reveals excerpts on Thursday but which will not be published until the fall, is causing trouble.
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In her book “Confidence Man”, to be published on October 4, 2022, the star journalist of the New York Times Maggie Haberman also writes that the wealthy Republican assured relatives that he had remained in contact with the North Korean dictator Kim. Jong Un after leaving the White House.
The reporter reports that during the Trump presidency, White House employees repeatedly found toilets in the former president’s apartments clogged with pieces of printed paper.
Donald Trump assured in a press release that this information had “been invented by a journalist in search of publicity”.
This revelation is published as the US National Archives, responsible for keeping the documents of US presidents, has asked the courts to open an investigation into Donald Trump, the Washington Post said on Wednesday.
The management by the Republican billionaire of his presidential archives has been called into question on several occasions in recent weeks: the institution indicated on Monday that it had to recover in Florida fifteen boxes of documents that Donald Trump had taken after leaving Washington in January 2021.
However, under a law of 1978, any American president must transmit all of his emails, letters and other working documents to the National Archives.
Last week, this institution had also revealed that the former leader had a habit of tearing up some of his working documents, another practice contrary to the law.
Another revelation in Maggie Haberman’s book concerns the relationship between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, which would therefore have continued after the Republican’s defeat in the presidential election in 2020, according to confidences made by the Republican to relatives.
The former president had described as “love letters” the messages sent by the North Korean dictator, with whom he maintained an assiduous diplomatic relationship, marked in particular by a historic meeting in 2019 in the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas. .
Since leaving power, Donald Trump has been the subject of numerous books of revelations signed either by journalists or by former relatives.