An enduring mystery might finally have been solved. Remember when Donald Trump ranted about how “people are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once,” and nobody knew what on earth he was talking about? Maybe he was referring to personal difficulties in trying to flush away official White House documents.
A forthcoming book by New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman, who covered Trump’s White House, reports that staff in the upstairs residence repeatedly found one of the toilets clogged with wads of printed paper. Trump issued a statement Thursday denying any and all document-flushing. But given what else we know about how he handled official paperwork — which belongs to the nation, not to him — I’m inclined to believe Haberman’s version of events.
From reporting in The Post, we learned this week that the National Archives and Records Administration had to recover 15 boxes of documents that Trump wrongly took with him to Mar-a-Lago, rather than sending them to the agency as required by law . . . . now the National Archives and Records Administration has asked the Justice Department to investigate the matter.
We also know that some of the documents Trump did send to the Archives when he left office were pieced together with tape because of Trump’s habit of ripping up papers by hand when he finished with them — despite having been repeatedly warned, including by his chiefs of staff, that federal law required all those materials to be preserved.
“People who have nothing to hide don’t … destroy evidence to keep it from being publicly archived as required under federal law.” That’s not me talking; that’s what Trump himself said at a campaign rally in 2016, as he railed about the earth-shattering importance of how Hillary Clinton had handled or mishandled her emails.
The Justice Department should indeed investigate whether Trump broke the law by destroying, stealing or flushing official documents that he was required to preserve and surrender to the Archives. Granted, it is much more urgent that Justice investigate whether Trump committed the crime of seditious conspiracy by inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. But the question of the documents cannot simply be dismissed with a “Trump will be Trump” shrug.
Unlike his cluttered business headquarters in Trump Tower, the Oval Office never belonged to Trump — or to any other president. It belongs to us, the American people, and so does the flood of paper that passes through.
And while the Justice Department has to be deliberate in deciding whether to launch any investigation, let alone one into the actions of a former president, Congress is under no such constraint. Let’s have some hearings, people.
If the Democrats in charge of the House and Senate have forgotten how to do this sort of thing, they should solicit some pointers from their colleagues across the aisle.
They fished for facts — or politically useful innuendo — from the FBI, the attorney general, the State Department, the office of the Director of National Intelligence and a host of other government agencies, as well as several private technology firms. In one month alone, September 2016, the GOP-led House Oversight and Reform Committee held five days of “emergency” hearings about Clinton’s emails and issued a dozen subpoenas.
Clinton was indeed careless. But Trump appears to have been both deliberate and persistent in his unlawful destruction of documents. Either the Presidential Records Act means something, or it doesn’t. Congress must choose.
A piece at The Atlantic continues this look into Trump lawless behavior and not just in the context of record destruction. Here are highlights:
Donald Trump doesn’t like to read, and, apparently, he doesn’t want other people to read either.
A series of reports this week have revealed how extensively the former president destroyed documents produced by his administration, in defiance of federal laws. When the House committee investigating January 6 and Trump’s attempts to overturn the election received documents it had requested from the National Archives, some of them had been ripped up and then taped back together—the work, respectively, of Trump, who has long handled papers that way, and staffers, who were trying to comply with federal laws requiring records preservation.
When he didn’t try to destroy documents, Trump absconded with some of them. In January, The Washington Post reports, the National Archives and Records Administration had to collect 15 boxes of records that Trump had improperly taken with him to his estate at Mar-a-Lago.
The Presidential Records Act, passed after Watergate, requires that all documents from an administration be preserved and archived by the government to create a historical record and avoid cover-ups. Compliance has sometimes been uneven, but it worsened under the last president. “Trump’s shredding of paper was far more widespread and indiscriminate than previously known and—despite multiple admonishments—extended throughout his presidency,” the Post reported. Crews would come behind the president, sweep up the remains, and then try to reassemble them. Some of these documents could be essential to understanding a singularly corrupt and dangerous administration, whether by congressional investigators today or historians in the future.
The PRA, like many laws dealing with the executive branch, was not designed for a president as lawless and shameless as Trump. These laws were designed to deal with someone like Richard Nixon: a corrupt lawbreaker, yes, but one who cared deeply about American institutions and his historical legacy. As a result, the statutes have weak or nonexistent enforcement mechanisms, because their framers assumed that shame or political pressure would take care of that.
The problem is that the statute doesn’t treat it as “critical” by instituting serious consequences for breaking it. The text doesn’t lay out enforcement, and when lawsuits have asked the courts to step in, judges have shied away from trying to “micromanage the president’s day-to-day compliance,” as a federal judge put it in 2020.
Trump learned early in his private-sector career that it is sometimes more advantageous to break the law and dare someone to call you out than to follow it—and that even if you get caught, the penalty is often a fine dwarfed by the upside of the infraction. He brought that philosophy to the White House . . .T rump’s White House lawyers repeatedly warned him about the legal requirement to save documents, just as they warned him about other possible violations of the law, but he had something more powerful than an attorney’s knowledge of the law: the knowledge that it didn’t matter.
Trump circumvented anti-nepotism rules against appointing family members to top administration positions by simply having the family members he appointed go unpaid. The salaries that advisers such as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump forwent were small compared with their fortunes, and besides, the family was making money from the government in other ways. . . . they knew they had little to fear, because the person in charge of enforcing the law was the president himself.
These relatively petty violations were just a warm-up. During the 2016 election, Trump welcomed Russian interference, but Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that he could not indict a sitting president. Emboldened, Trump set about soliciting foreign help even more brazenly. The one body that could punish him was Congress, but he realized that he could run out the clock on investigations by stonewalling—with, you guessed it, little enforcement. Eventually, Congress took the dramatic step of impeaching him, but once Trump realized that the Senate would not convict him, he was back to the same behavior even before the vote occurred. As I wrote in January 2021, his attempts at overturning the 2020 election were the price of failing to punish him then.
The Presidential Records Act was designed to make sure that future generations could understand serious misdeeds like these; it is a bitter irony that the law may fail for the same reasons that the misdeeds went unpunished. Scotch-tape-wielding officials can save only so much, and records that have been destroyed can never be recovered. The problem is one that a famous creator of executive-branch records, Donald Rumsfeld, might have called an “unknown unknown”: Because there is no way of identifying what records Trump might have destroyed or stolen, we’ll never know what we don’t know about the Trump presidency.
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