Trump White House turned over records that were torn up by former president, National Archives confirms
The National Archives on Monday issued a rare statement confirming that records turned over from the Trump White House “included paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump.”
“White House records management officials during the Trump Administration recovered and taped together some of the torn-up records,” the statement read. “These were turned over to the National Archives at the end of the Trump Administration, along with a number of torn-up records that had not been reconstructed by the White House.”
The statement came after the Washington Post reported that some of the 700 pages of documents that the National Archives transmitted to the House select committee investigating the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, had “been ripped up and then taped back together.”
Trump had sought to block the release of the records, which reportedly include drafts of executive orders and speeches, presidential diaries and handwritten notes concerning the events of Jan. 6.
But last month the Supreme Court denied the former president’s request to prevent the select committee from obtaining the records, and the National Archives immediately began the process of transmitting the trove to the committee.
The National Archives did not confirm or deny the report that some of the documents now in the committee’s possession had been torn up by Trump.
The Presidential Records Act requires that all records created by presidents be preserved and turned over to the National Archives at the end of their administrations.
In 2018, Politico reported that Trump had a habit of routinely tearing presidential records into shreds, forcing staffers armed with Scotch tape to piece together fragments of paper that were “so small they looked like confetti.”
“White House aides realized early on that they were unable to stop Trump from ripping up paper after he was done with it and throwing it in the trash or on the floor,” the report read. “Instead, they chose to clean it up for him, in order to make sure that the president wasn’t violating the law.”
One of the records reportedly received by the Jan. 6 committee is a draft of an executive order directing the Department of Defense to seize voting machines, part of Trump’s broader efforts to push baseless voter fraud claims and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that Trump directed his lawyer Rudy Giuliani to call the Department of Homeland Security to ask if the department could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states. According to the report, Kenneth Cuccinelli, then the acting deputy secretary of homeland security, told Giuliani that he lacked the authority to do so.
