Going Don the toilet
A spokesman for former President Donald Trump denied he tried to dispose of White House documents by flushing them down toilets, after Axios published two images of paper allegedly bearing Trump’s handwriting at the bottom of commodes.
“You have to be pretty desperate to sell books if pictures of paper in a toilet bowl is part of your promotional plan,” Taylor Budowich told the site, which published the images after they were obtained by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman ahead of the October publication of her book “Confidence Man.”
He added that “there’s enough people willing to fabricate stories like this in order to impress the media class — a media class who is willing to run with anything, as long as it anti-Trump.”
One photo, purportedly taken in the White House, shows a ripped note with “where” written on it at the bottom of a toilet.
The second photo, which was allegedly taken while Trump was on an overseas trip, featured a torn piece of paper bearing the names “Rogers” and “Stefanik” — presumably referring to upstate Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) — in the toilet.
Haberman, who initially reported that Trump liked flushing his notes in February of this year, stood by her reporting Monday.
“People are going to make all kinds of jokes about toilets and so forth,” she said on CNN. “It would still be a story if it was a fireplace. And the point is about the destruction of records which are supposed to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act, which is a Watergate-era creation.
“We knew that Trump had a habit of ripping up paper and that people had to tape it back together,” Haberman added, “and, so, what was happening was White House residence staff were finding pipes were clogged with paper that they believed he had flushed . . . I’d had additional reporting afterwards from people confirming that Trump had indeed done this and that it happened on at least two foreign trips and in the White House throughout his presidency.”
Trump blasted the accusation in February.Callie Patteson