Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Pressure put on N.Y. academy to hide Trump’s school files
WASHINGTON — In 2011, days after Donald Trump challenged President Barack Obama to “show his records” to prove that he hadn’t been a “terrible student,” the headmaster at New York Military Academy got an order from his boss: Find Trump’s academic records and help bury them.
The superintendent of the private school “came to me in a panic because he had been accosted by prominent, wealthy alumni of the school who were Mr. Trump’s friends” and who wanted to keep his records secret, recalled Evan Jones, the headmaster at the time. “He said, ‘You need to go grab that record and deliver it to me because I need to deliver it to them.’ ”
The superintendent, Jeffrey Coverdale, confirmed this week that members of the school’s board of trustees initially wanted him to hand over Trump’s records to them, but Coverdale said he refused.
“I was given directives, part of which I could follow but part of which I could not, and that was handing them over to the trustees,” he said. “I moved them elsewhere on campus, where they could not be released. It’s the only time I ever moved an alumnus’ records.”
The former NYMA officials’ recollections add new details to one of the allegations that Michael Cohen, the president’s longtime personal lawyer, made before Congress last week. Cohen, who told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that part of his job was to attack Trump’s critics and defend his reputation, said Trump ordered him “to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.”
Trump has frequently boasted that he was a stellar student, but he declined throughout the 2016 campaign to release any of his academic records, telling The Washington Post then, “I’m not letting you look at anything.”
Last year, he said he “heard I was first in my class” at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business program, where he finished his undergraduate degree, but Trump’s name does not appear on the school’s dean’s list or on the list of students who received academic honors in his class of 1968.
Trump spent five years at the military academy, starting in fall 1959, after his father — having concluded that his son, then in seventh grade, needed a more discipline-focused setting — removed him from his Queens private school and sent him to NYMA.
At the academy, which modeled its strict code of conduct after the nearby U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Trump loved competing to win contests for cleanest room or bestmade bed. Although not known as an academic standout, he was a baseball player and was well-known on campus for bringing women there and showing them around. Despite getting a series of Vietnam War medical deferments for bone spurs in his feet, Trump has said his military academy background provided “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”
Trump said during the 2016 campaign that he “did very well under the military system. I became one of the top guys at the whole school.”
Those who were aware of the 2011 effort to conceal Trump’s records said the request set off a frenzy at the military academy.
The boarding school had no formal archive at the time. Jones said he combed through the basement of Scarborough Hall on the academy’s campus 60 miles north of New York and found the real estate mogul’s transcript in file cabinets containing student records.
“I don’t know if we should be doing this,” Jones recalled telling his boss.
Coverdale declined to say where he hid Trump’s records or to identify the people who ordered him to pull them out of the school’s files.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Leaders of the academy’s board from that time also did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did the school’s current superintendent, Jie Zhang.