Former President Donald Trump never liked leaving a paper trail. He’s reportedly had a habit of ripping up papers when he was finished with them since his days as a simple real estate mogul slash con man.
It’s a tic that lasted throughout his presidency, despite being in clear violation of federal law. Those documents that Trump mangled, tore, and otherwise destroyed are now more important than ever. But we may never know their true number — of contents.
Those documents that Trump mangled, tore, and otherwise destroyed are now more important than ever.
Trump’s penchant for wanton destruction of government property was first reported in 2018. At the time, it was just another thing to add to the towering pile of “what the hell is even happening” that Trump generated almost daily. But then the House Jan. 6 committee subpoenaed White House records, a request Trump fought up to the Supreme Court. When those documents were eventually handed over to Congress, though, it turns out several of them had been “ripped up and then taped back together,” as The Washington Post reported.
Congress passed the Presidential Records Act in 1978 to make what was once an emergency measure to prevent former President Richard Nixon from destroying possible evidence into a permanent practice. Since then, presidents (and vice presidents) have had to relinquish control of official documents created while serving in the White House to the National Archives and Records Administration. Those documents are kept out of sight for five years — up to 12 for certain documents — but can be accessed via Freedom of Information Act requests afterward.
Trump’s latest document debacle
There have been frequent small-scale violations in every administration since then — but, as with most things regarding presidential rule-breaking, Trump took it to a whole other level. The Washington Post found last week that Trump never stopped being an absolute menace to the poor staffers trying to keep their boss from breaking the law:
Typically, the White House records office makes decisions on archival vs. non-archival materials, according to an Archives official. The Presidential Records Act lays out a process allowing a president to dispose of records only after obtaining the assent of records officials.
It is unclear how many records were lost or permanently destroyed through Trump’s ripping routine, as well as what consequences, if any, he might face. Hundreds of documents, if not more, were likely torn up, those familiar with the practice say.
Adding to the absurdity, The Washington Post reported Monday that the National Archives recovered more documents from Mar-a-Lago last month, including “correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which Trump once described as ‘love letters,’ as well as a letter left for his successor by President Barack Obama.”
NARA confirmed in an emailed statement Monday that it had collected 15 boxes of records that “should have been transferred to NARA from the White House at the end of the Trump Administration in January 2021.” How many more boxes might be floating around out there? Well, that’s unclear — even to Trump’s own team, apparently. “Former President Trump’s representatives have informed NARA that they are continuing to search for additional Presidential records that belong to the National Archives,” the National Archives said in its statement.
In a more sensical world, there might be some kind of consequence for this blatant disregard for the law. But the Presidential Records Act as written has no enforcement mechanism, leaving no option of criminal charges. And it’s not like the National Archives has a team of document hunters it can deploy to track down wayward memos. (Though that would make for a great Netflix series.)
It’s not like the National Archives has a team of document hunters it can deploy to track down wayward memos.
That doesn’t mean it’s not a crime to destroy records that belong to the federal government. The Justice Department’s Criminal Resource Manual notes there is a “broad prohibition against destruction of government records or attempts to destroy such records” under 18 U.S. Code § 2071. Violation of this clause can lead to a fine or jail time; if carried out by a person “having the custody” of the thing that’s taken or destroyed, they “shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”
Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman alleged in an interview that former President Trump “loved to tear up those documents,” after the National Archives said last week that documents handed over to the Jan. 6 committee “included paper records had been torn up” by Trump.
In an interview with MSNBC host Ali Velshi, Manigault Newman alleged that there are “certain things that I’m sure cannot be accounted for because Donald Trump became very very aware that a lot of these sensitive documents would at some point be made public.”
“After [Trump attorney] Michael Cohen left the office and I walked into the Oval, Donald — in my view — was chewing what he had just torn up,” she said on MSNBC.
“It was very bizarre because he is a germophobe he never puts the paper in his mouth,” Manigault Newman said on the show.
Manigault Newman, who was fired by then-White House chief of staff John Kelly in 2017, has since emerged as a vocal Trump critic.
She had previously described the same alleged incident in her 2018 book, titled “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House,” writing that she saw Trump chewing up a piece of paper following a meeting with Cohen, his personal lawyer at the time.
“His habit of tearing these things up … my heart truly goes out to the people responsible for going in the trash bins [and] recovering these things,” Manigault Newman said in the interview.
Manigault Newman added that the White House staff once got a briefing on Presidential records and said “we had been told that if you’re with the president and he hands you something … you have to account for that.”
She said it “makes me worry” that there are a lot of documents that may not be accounted for and added, “that there may be documents that can tell the full story about what happened on the days leading up to January 6th, for instance, that we may never see or may never come to light.”
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Trump did not immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment.
Manigault Newman’s comments come as the National Archives and Records Administration retrieved multiple White House record boxes last month that were improperly kept at former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property.
The Presidential Records Act, which was put in place following the Watergate scandal, requires administrations to document and maintain records of the White House decision-making process. However, Politico reported in 2018 that Trump had a habit of destroying files, and said that he preferred to tear them up once finished with them.
