White House residential staff reportedly found wads of printed paper clogging Trump’s toilet
Peter Weber, Senior editor – February 10, 2022
Donald Trump parody museum
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman unveiled the name and title of her book on former President Donald Trump on Thursday, and Axios, which says Haberman’s Confidence Man will be “the book Trump fears most,” got a sneak peak at some of her discoveries. Trump, for instance, reportedly has told people he has kept in contact with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un since leaving office. But the most eye-catching scoop involves clogged toilets.
Whiile Trump was in office, White House residence staff would occasionally discover wads of printed paper clogging a toilet and believed Trump had tried to flush it down, Axios reports, citing Haberman’s book. Trump was, at times, fixated on toilets that wouldn’t flush, as The Washington Post‘s Philip Bump noted.
Top White House officials were so “deeply concerned” about Trump’s handling of sensitive national security material that one of this chiefs of staff, John Kelly, “tried to stop classified documents from being taken out of the Oval Office and brought up to the residence because he was concerned about what Mr. Trump may do with them and how that may jeopardize national security,” the Times reported Wednesday.
Former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman wrote in her 2018 Trump White House book, Unhinged, that she saw Trump “put a note in his mouth” in the Oval Office “appeared to be chewing and swallowing the paper,” a shocking action for a famous “germaphobe.”
Skating legend Katarina Witt says adults responsible for Kamila Valieva’s failed drug test should be barred ‘forever’
Jake Epstein and Meredith Cash – February 11, 2022
Kamila Valieva of the Russian Olympic Committee trains at the Winter Olympics on Thursday in Beijing.
A German skater said those responsible for Kamila Valieva’s failed drug test should be barred.
Katarina Witt said on Facebook Valieva likely followed the advice of her coach and medical team.
“The responsible adults should be banned from sport forever,” Witt said.
German skating legend Katarina Witt said adults responsible for Russian Olympic Committee figure skater Kamila Valieva’s failed drug test should be barred from the sport “forever.”
“As an athlete, you follow the advice of your loved ones and, in this case, always first of all the coaching and medical team,” Witt, a two-time Olympic champion, wrote on Facebook Thursday. “You just trust that they know what is right and what is wrong.”
Valieva of Team ROC reacts during the Women Single Skating Free Skating Team Event at the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
“She is not to blame here,” Witt wrote. “If anything, the responsible adults should be banned from sport forever.”
Witt added that, as an athlete, “you always follow the advice of your confidants.”
Valieva.
In Valieva’s case, Witt said, “she probably followed her coach and medical team.”
“I admire Kamila as a radiant star, who burst into the orbit of the international skating world,” Witt said. “And I still very much wish she has come to stay.”
Valieva’s performance in the Olympic figure-skating team event helped power the Russian Olympic Committee to a gold medal — an achievement that the organization has vowed to defend. But since the discovery of the positive test for Trimetazidine — a heart medication typically used to treat the symptoms of vertigo — the medal ceremony has been delayed indefinitely.
Valieva (left) and her ROC teammates celebrate after winning the Team Event of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games.
The World Anti-Doping Agency categorizes the drug as a “hormone and metabolic modulator,” per the Associated Press. When taken without proper cause, the drug can help bolster endurance and improve circulation. Both effects could give a high-level figure skater a significant competitive advantage.
Valieva was initially slapped with a provisional suspension from Russia’s anti-doping agency (RUSADA) after the positive test surfaced. However, following a swift appeal, the ban was overturned on February 9. As of now, the Kazan, Russia, native is still free to compete in Beijing.
That could soon change, though. The International Olympic Committee has exercised its right to challenge that decision at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the ITA said.
Valieva during training on Friday in the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games.
Meanwhile, the ROC said Valieva “has the right to train and take part in competitions in full without restriction” unless the CAS says otherwise.
Valieva is set compete in the individual competition on February 15.
Republicans Who Railed About Clinton Emails Are Quiet on Trump’s Records
Lisa Lerer and Katie Rogers – February 11, 2022
President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Nov. 13, 2020. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times)
Donald Trump once thundered that the questions surrounding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server were “bigger than Watergate.” On his 2016 presidential campaign, “where are her emails?” became a Republican rallying cry that was soon replaced with an even more threatening demand: “Lock her up.”
Now, it’s Trump who faces accusations of improperly taking government records to his private residence. But among Republicans, once so forceful about the issue of mishandling documents, there was little sign of outrage.
Several Republicans who once railed against Clinton’s document retention practices did not respond Thursday to questions about Trump’s actions. Others who had been directly involved with investigating Clinton declined to discuss the specifics except to suggest, without evidence, that the National Archives and Records Administration was treating Trump more harshly.
“Why is the archives handling this differently?” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked in a statement relayed through his spokesperson.
Although the details differ, the broad strokes of the controversy over a former official’s handling of government documents were strikingly familiar, prompting a wave of Democratic anger — and some painful memories. The fact that Clinton was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing only added to the sense of frustration among Democrats.
“There is just the hypocrisy and irony of it all,” said Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist and former Clinton aide, who added that she wasn’t particularly surprised by the new accusations against Trump. “This is who Donald Trump is. He frequently will attack people falsely for things he is actually doing.”
News reports this week revealed that after a lengthy back-and-forth between Trump’s lawyers and the National Archives, the former president handed over more than a dozen boxes of records, including documents, mementos, gifts and letters that he was legally required to leave in the custody of the federal government. National Archives officials believe the boxes included classified information. Staff in the White House residence also thought that the president had flushed pieces of paper, after periodically discovering wads of printed paper clogging the toilet, according to a forthcoming book, “Confidence Man,” written by a New York Times reporter, about Trump and his presidency.
The yearslong State Department probe of emails sent to Clinton’s private computer server concluded with a whimper in 2019, when State Department investigators sent a report to Congress finding that “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
Grassley, who started investigating Clinton’s email server in 2017, pushed for a finding nearly three years after the conclusion of the campaign, sparking speculation that Republicans were seeking to revive an issue that had been political advantageous.
In his statement about the charges against Trump, Grassley said, “The law is the law, and it ought to be enforced regardless of which party is involved.” He added that he believed the National Archives at the time “was less inclined” to involve the Justice Department in the recovery of Clinton’s emails.
“But now, after the Archives was able to recover presidential records, it seems to want to loop in the Justice Department” he said.
Jason Chaffetz, a former Republican congressman of Utah who as chair of the House Oversight Committee led extensive investigations into Clinton’s emails, said Thursday that the two situations were different. Clinton, he said, set up a “convenient arrangement” in which she stored State Department communications on a private server, in violation of agency policy.
In the case of the former president, Chaffetz said, he needed to know more about what, specifically, Trump took from the White House, and if there were duplicate or digital copies of what Trump had reportedly flushed down the toilet or ripped up. When asked about detailed news reports, Chaffetz said that this behavior did “not necessarily” constitute destroying records.
“I believe in the sanctity of the federal records,” Chaffetz said, “but you’re going to have to come up with specific instances.”
In a text message, Liz Harrington, a spokesperson for Trump, said that the former president had worked with the National Archives “to preserve documents that he could have kept in his possession as personal items if he had wanted.”
Several former Trump White House officials, who regularly attacked Clinton, had nothing to say about Trump’s decision to take documents with him to Mar-a-Lago.
But Stephanie Grisham, a former campaign aide who was White House press secretary for Trump, said in a text message that the seriousness of consequences for Trump would hinge on what he took and also on the broad power he had as president to declassify materials.
“I think the recent revelations deserve scrutiny,” said Grisham, who has written a book about her time in the White House. “But until it’s known what kinds of information was taken/handled improperly, it’s hard to compare the two.”
Trump showed little such restraint. His belief that Clinton had intentionally mishandled email from her home office became a central focus of his campaign and a rallying cry for his supporters. The idea so fixated him that he called on a foreign government to conduct cyberespionage against a former secretary of state.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said, referring to emails Clinton had deleted from the private account she had used when she was secretary of state. (The Russians, it turns out, might have been listening.)
But questions about the conduct of Trump White House officials quickly emerged. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, repeatedly used private messaging services for official White House business in a way that may have violated federal records laws. The president’s habit of ripping up documents when he was done with them prompted some aides to retrieve shreds from the garbage and send them to records management to tape them back together.
There were signs Thursday that Democrats may approach Trump’s possible violations with some of the same fervor as their Republican opponents.
On Thursday, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said she had asked the National Archives for more information about how the agency had communicated with Trump about the records he had taken. Maloney, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, has promised to investigate whether or not Trump attempted to destroy records.
For her part, Clinton took a lighter approach. On Monday, she shared on Twitter a headline from a Washington Post article detailing Trump’s habit of shredding documents, along with a link to a cup featuring a famous photo of Clinton, wearing sunglasses and scrolling on her BlackBerry.
The slogan embossed on the coffee mug? “But her emails.”
‘We Had No Rules’ In Trump Administration, Former Official Says Of Shredding Scandal
https://youtube.com/watch?v=85MW3P4J7bM%3Frel%3D0
Mary Papenfuss – February 11, 2022
Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham is not the least bit surprised about reports that Donald Trump shredded many official documents and removed others to his home when he left office in apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act.
“I wasn’t surprised when I saw the report,” Grisham told CNN on Friday, referring to an initial story in The Washington Post. “I think that what’s important is this is another example of a White House and an administration that just — we had no rules. We followed no rules.”
Grisham also noted that the former president is a “very, very paranoid man.” She surmised that this fed into Trump’s almost obsessive destruction of documents and confirmed the Post’s reporting that “he always tore everything up.”
The former press secretary recalled being on a flight with Trump to the Middle East and watching him going through boxes. He put some papers in folders, signed others — and ripped up the rest, she said.
“He was tearing some things up and throwing it on the floor, which was completely normal. He did that in the White House. He did that in the residence. And then he would tear up some pieces of paper and I saw him put some of the torn up pieces of paper in his jacket inside pocket,” she added.
The National Archives confirmed early this week that it managed to recover 15 boxes of documents that Trump had removed to his residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida when he left office.
The boxes of documents he took with him included historically important communications, including a letter that former President Barack Obama left for Trump when he took over the Oval Office, and letters from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, sources told the Post.
Grisham said she believes it must all be investigated and called it “another example of what we do not want, ever, back in our government at the highest level in the White House again.”
Hawley proved he’s not just antidemocratic in coup attempt. He’s also a sloppy lawyer
Alan Howard – February 10, 2022
Associated Press file photo
A prime example of bad lawyering is when a lawyer loses a possibly winnable case because he misses an important legal deadline. A recent decision by a Pennsylvania court suggests that is essentially what Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri did when he waited until Jan. 6, 2021, to oppose Pennsylvania’s “no excuse” mail in voting law on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
Late last month, by a 3-2 margin, a lower court in Pennsylvania decided in the McLinko v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania case that the state’s no-excuse mail-in voting law conflicted with a provision of the state constitution. But all of the five lower court judges, Republicans and Democrats, unanimously reaffirmed what the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had previously ruled in the December 2020 case of Kelly v. Pennsylvania: that after an election is held, the no-excuse mail-in votes must be deemed legally valid because it is legally too late to disqualify those votes. But that is exactly what Hawley tried and failed to do on Jan. 6.
In addition to being legally invalid, Hawley’s objection to the Senate certification of Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes for President Joe Biden was inequitable and antidemocratic. Hawley challenged the legitimacy of America’s 2020 presidential election, and sought to cancel millions of votes legally cast by the people of Pennsylvania, on the basis of a legal argument that had already been rejected by the highest state and federal courts. Hawley falsely suggested that the United States, the longest continuous democracy on the planet, allowed its citizens to cast and count millions of illegal votes for the most powerful political office in the world. By improperly seeking to discredit and disallow Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for Biden, Hawley collaborated with Donald Trump’s corrosive effort to convince the American people — and the world — that America’s presidential election was improper and illegal.
As a matter of law, Hawley was wrong to base his attack on Pennsylvania’s votes on a legal premise that had already been rejected by the state’s Supreme Court in the Kelly case. As a trained lawyer, Hawley must have understood that the argument he made on the floor of the Senate had already been rejected by the judiciary on the basis of an overriding procedural doctrine, the doctrine of laches, which applied equally to Hawley’s untimely objection.
In applying the doctrine of laches to uphold the legitimacy of the mail-in votes cast in Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court correctly held that there was an overwhelming need to protect the legitimate reliance of the Pennsylvania voters on a then-unchallenged state law that clearly authorized their no-excuse mail-in votes at the time the votes were cast. It is a shame that Hawley did not apply such an enlightened and legally grounded approach to respect and protect millions of legally cast votes by American citizens when he made his theatrical stand in the Senate.
The laches law applies equally Hawley’s Electoral College challenge. Like the tardy and defeated plaintiffs in Kelly, Hawley was seeking no less than the “disenfranchisement of millions of Pennsylvania voters,” as the Pennsylvania high court phrased the issue, contrary to applicable law as already determined by the applicable and final judicial rulings.
All of the judges in the recent McLinko case, Republicans and Democrats, sent a powerful message to anyone — Hawley, Trump, or anyone else — who thinks, however without basis, that mail-in votes are inherently a threat to electoral integrity that they must bring their legal challenges before voters reasonably rely on the laws to cast their ballots. Nothing stopped anyone with standing from challenging the Pennsylvania no-excuse mail-in voting law before the 2020 presidential election. (Indeed, that is what the plaintiffs have so far successfully done in the McLinko litigation for the next Pennsylvania election.)
Hawley’s failure to enlist a plaintiff in Pennsylvania to do so before the 2020 election, but instead asking the U.S. Senate to unfairly disenfranchise millions of Pennsylvania voters after the election in violation of the controlling equitable doctrine of laches, was a colossal example of bad lawyering — but far more important, it was shamefully inequitable, anti-democratic and anti-American voter.
Alan Howard is a professor of law emeritus at the St. Louis University Law School, where he taught constitutional law. He co-authored this with his brother Bruce Howard, an attorney in Los Angeles and a former professor of law at the University of Southern California Law School.
The right-wing network’s coverage of rising tension at the northern border has been very different from how its personalities have handled southern border dramas.
A new “Daily Show” supercut shows the hypocrisy by mashing up footage of the trucker protests with comments Fox News figures have made about migrants approaching from the south:https://www.youtube.com/embed/qSSg1J7EYSo?rel=0
The trucker blockade began with a protest over coronavirus vaccine mandates.
However, the Canadian Trucking Alliance, which represents truckers, said last month that “a great number of these protestors have no connection to the trucking industry and have a separate agenda.”
COVID-19: We need to vaccinate more young people and kids, doctor urges
Adriana Belmonte, Senior Editor – February 10, 2022
Only about 20% of children between the ages of 5-11 in the U.S. are fully vaccinated despite COVID-19 vaccines being approved for this age group three months ago.
For kids between the ages of 12-17, roughly half are vaccinated while just 20% are boosted. In other words, there are still millions of children vulnerable to COVID-19.
“I think more of us need to be really frank with the American people … that [vaccines] are safe, they are effective, that COVID is massively affecting kids, especially during this Omicron surge,” Dr. Anand Swaminathan, a New Jersey-based emergency medicine physician, said on Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “And these [cases] are preventable. These are preventable hospitalizations. They are preventable deaths in kids.”
‘Their lives are being affected by their long-term symptoms’
COVID cases among children have risen steadily over the last several months, largely due to the virulence of the Omicron variant.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), there have been nearly 4.2 million cases reported since the beginning of January and nearly 632,000 cases for the week ending Feb. 3. That more than doubles the Delta variant peak in 2021.
“The American Academy of Pediatrics and really every pediatrician that I’ve had the good fortune to meet has been very strong on the side of vaccinating children,” Fairbrother said. “It is true that COVID is not a huge risk to children. There are very few children who got super sick with COVID, and an even smaller percentage of them who died of COVID.”
Since COVID first hit the U.S., over 12 million children have tested positive for the virus, according to AAP. Less than 1% of the COVID cases among children have resulted in death.
Children wearing protective masks toss snow at each other as they skate at Bryant Park in New York City, January 14, 2022. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
“It’s not a huge number but still, seven died in January from COVID,” Swaminathan said. “Those are preventable deaths. We don’t need to have any kids dying of this. Vaccines can help to protect the group where they’re approved.”
At the same time, children infected with the coronavirus are at risk for developing multi-system inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C), which the CDC defines as “a condition where different body parts can become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs.” There have been more than 6,800 cases of MIS-C in the U.S. and 59 deaths tied to the issue.
“Their lives are being affected by their long-term symptoms,” Dr. Hilary Fairbrother, a Houston-based emergency medicine physician, said recently on Yahoo Finance Live. “And that’s 10-15% of children who get COVID. All of these things are mitigated by the vaccine. MIS-C is essentially gone. 95% reduction of MIS-C. The long-term COVID symptoms, essentially gone, and essentially zero ability to have COVID kill a child who is vaccinated.”
‘These are the safest vaccines we have ever seen’
Pfizer (PFE) recently announced that it would be seeking FDA approval and emergency use authorization for its COVID vaccine for children six months and older, which Fairbrother described as “very exciting.”
Fairbrother emphasized the safety and efficacy of the vaccines and encouraged parents who may be unsure about vaccinating their children to speak with their pediatrician.
“I know that parents are very caring and very loving about their children,” Fairbrother said. “And they want to make sure something is safe before they give their children a new product. I want to come out and be very clear that in our modern medical history, these are the safest vaccines we have ever seen or really, frankly, even imagined.”
Brayden Burton, 3, sits with his father, Grant Burton, while he is treated for COVID at the Children’s Hospital of Georgia in Augusta, Georgia, January 14, 2022. REUTERS/Hannah Beier
Though Pfizer’s recent news is a promising development in the fight against COVID, Swaminathan cautioned against only focusing on “the new shiny toy” when there are already things in place that have proven to be effective, like vaccinations for the population at large.
Currently, 64.1% of the overall U.S. population is fully vaccinated while 75.7% have received at least one dose and 42.3% have been boosted, according to the latest CDC data.
Vaccinating more young people and the spread of different COVID strains may be key to developing immunity in the overall population, according to Dr. Asha Shah, director of infectious disease at Stamford Health.
“That will help contribute to the shift from pandemic to endemic and not thinking about COVID first thing when you’re making social plans or making travel plans, that this becomes like many of the other coronaviruses that circulate in the community,” Shah recently said on Yahoo Finance Live. “That will likely take some time, but this may be a shift in that direction.”
Shah described vaccines as “our most important tool” that can help the population adjust to new variants that could potentially emerge.
“I think the fact that technology exists and that these companies are working on new formulations is a smart way to move forward,” she said. “And I do think we’re going to get to a point where perhaps we get a COVID booster at a regular interval that perhaps contains the most predominant variants from the last COVID season, similar to what we do for influenza.”
Shaw stressed that a larger part of the population needs to be up-to-date on their COVID vaccines, whether they need first or second doses or are in need of a booster.
“There’s still a lot of people that have not received a single dose of a COVID vaccine, and that’s a problem,” she said. “And that’s what we saw was overwhelming the hospitals through this last surge. We have to get everyone vaccinated with this very effective tool. That’s the way we move forward.”
Adriana Belmonte is a reporter and editor covering politics and health care policy for Yahoo Finance.
McConnell shudders after trump unmasks the GOP as the party of pro-January 6 lawlessness
Kerry Eleveld, Daily Kos Staff – February 10, 2022
If the Republican Party is going to attack the Biden administration on the national uptick in crime—including a record-spike in homicides during Donald Trump’s tenure—it must be viewed as the party of law and order.
The fact that Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are now endorsing the Jan. 6 attack and bear-hugging its perpetrators has McConnell running scared.
“This is pretty simple,” McConnell told CNN on Wednesday. “We are in the middle of a national crime wave. The Republican Party is a pro-police, tough-on-crime party. And I am a pro-police, tough-on-crime Republican across the board.”
Is it really, Senator?
McConnell made the assertion just weeks after Trump dangled the idea of pardoning every Jan. 6 convict if he wins reelection in 2024. McConnell’s claim also stood in stark contrast to the Republican National Committee’s endorsement last week of the deadly violence unleashed by Jan. 6 attackers as “legitimate political discourse.” In fact, the violent insurrection injured more than a hundred police officers protecting the Capitol that day, several of whom died, and to this day, many officers continue to suffer from ongoing mental anguish due to the trauma of the attack.
Yet, given the choice between the police who defended U.S. lawmakers and the insurrectionists who beat them and defiled the Capitol, both Trump and the national Republican Party sided with the insurrectionists.
Two separate polls this week have shown that roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose pardoning people who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol—one from Politico/Morning Consult and one from Navigator Research.
On Tuesday, McConnell pushed back against the RNC censure resolution declaring the Jan. 6 attack “legitimate political discourse.” Rejecting that characterization outright, McConnell called the pro-Trump assault on the Capitol a “violent insurrection.”
Most congressional Republicans, not wanting to anger McConnell, have conceded that the attack was violent, but almost all of them have taken issue with the word “insurrection.”
“I don’t know that I would go that far. But it was something that we’re not proud of,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama told CNN. “It was violent. I just wouldn’t call it an insurrection.”
Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, a Freedom Caucus member, said only a “small portion” of Jan. 6 rioters broke the law and should be prosecuted. But, he added, “It was not an attempt to overthrow the government. It was not.”
This point of distinction between criminal violence and a full-blown insurrection is surely one of the reasons Republicans had originally insisted on a very narrow investigation of Jan. 6 itself, excluding an exploration of the broader context of what led to the attack. Widening the lens to the events leading up to Jan. 6 makes it glaringly apparent that the Capitol assault was just one small part of a Trump-led conspiracy to overturn a free and fair election.
Regardless, endorsing the Capitol attack, at its core, is an endorsement of lawlessness and chaos, and McConnell desperately wants the Republican Party to be able to claim the mantle of law and order heading into the midterms.
Too bad Donald Trump and the RNC have completely blown up that notion.
Why the Trump toilet story (unfortunately) still matters
Joel Mathis, Contributing Writer – February 10, 2022
Donald Trump. Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock
Did former President Donald Trump really clog White House toilets by flushing official documents? His aides certainly thought so, journalist Maggie Haberman reports in her forthcoming book. Trump denies the story. But the anecdote rings true — if only as a metaphor for his misbegotten presidency.
The toilet story is the cherry on top of a week’s worth of revelations about how Trump routinely mishandled his administration’s records. He would tear up documents, forcing federal archivists to literally tape them back together. He took 15 boxes of stuff — letters from Kim Jong Un, that infamous Sharpie map — home to Mar-a-Lago instead of turning it over to the National Archives, as required by law. Some of the material was apparently classified. Investigations are now underway.
The “but her emails” crowd is howling, as you might imagine.
And that’s fair. Trump really did ride to the presidency in 2016 on the back of revelations that Hillary Clinton used a private email server to conduct official business while she was secretary of state. Democrats have spent the last half-dozen years grumbling that the investigation and media coverage of a relatively minor misstep prevented the election of America’s first woman president and instead put a dishonest grifter in office. But Trump’s hypocrisy on that front has been known for awhile now. For the former president, standards are for other people.
What’s really interesting about the recent stories is not the rule-breaking, then, but what they reveal about Trump’s overall mindset in the presidency. A born narcissist, he never did distinguish between his personal business and the country’s interests, between public service and his private desires. It all got mushed up together, usually to Trump’s benefit and America’s disadvantage.
It’s why he refused to divest his assets when he became president. It’s why the Trump Hotel in Washington D.C. became for a few years the hottest spot in town for foreign diplomats and assorted influence peddlers. It’s why he mostly treated the pandemic as an election obstacle and not as the public health crisis it actually was. And it’s why he tried to upend the 2020 presidential election — he sincerely believed the White House was his to keep.
So it’s no wonder Trump took all those boxes home to Florida, or that he treated official documents so casually. It was all his stuff, right? Except it wasn’t. It belonged to the American public.
This might not be worth getting terribly worked up over. There are a lot of Trump scandals, after all, and one must prioritize. But Trump remains the frontrunner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. What’s past is prologue. The former president is not trying to return to public service — it’s not clear he even understands the concept. He’s simply trying to reclaim what’s his.
Trump denies flushing records down the toilet, says he was told he was under ‘no obligation’ to turn over documents, despite the law requiring it
Brent D. Griffiths – February 10, 2022
Former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds on October 09, 2021.Scott Olson/Getty Images
Trump denies Maggie Haberman’s report that he would clog toilets by trying to flush documents down them.
Trump also says he was “told I was under no obligation” to promptly turn over his records, which isn’t how the law works.
There are now at least four reported ways Trump tried to destroy documents in the White House.
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday denied reports that he flushed documents down a White House toilet and said he was told he was under “no obligation” to turn over his administration’s records, a claim that flies in the face of presidential records law.
“Also, another fake story, that I flushed papers and documents down a White House toilet, is categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book,” Trump said in a statement released by his Save America PAC after Axios reported on excerpts of New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s upcoming book, “Confidence Man.”
Bloomberg White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs said Haberman’s reporting about the documents in toilets is “100% accurate” and that sources at the time confirm that staff found torn up pieces of papers in toilets and thought that Trump was behind it.
Trump has now faced days of questions and reports over his apparent flouting of the Presidential Records Act, which requires every White House to preserve memos, documents, and other memorabilia that is considered the property of the American people.
“In actuality, I have been told I was under no obligation to give this material based on various legal rulings that have been made over the years,” Trump claimed in his statement.
The National Archives, which collects, sorts through, and later releases presidential records, has asked the Justice Department to investigate if Trump broke the law when he took documents to Mar-a-Lago, The Washington Post reported. In another sign of the seriousness of the situation, The Times reports that officials found possible classified information in the documents Trump belatedly handed over.
There are now at least four reported ways Trump sought to destroy documents while in the White House:
He ripped them up (as Politico first reported in 2018).
Axios, citing Haberman’s book, reports that “staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper.”
Historians and experts have pointed out that the Presidential Records Act is relatively toothless in punishing those who fail to comply with it. But, as The Daily Beast reported, one federal law dealing with the mutilation or destruction of documents carries the possibility that Trump could be barred from ever holding office again.
