Trump’s documents: A trail of destruction
It looks like former President Trump “flushed history down a White House toilet,” said Jonathan Allen in NBCNews.com. A new book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman reveals that White House staff repeatedly had to unclog a toilet in the upstairs residence that Trump stuffed with wads of torn-up documents. This report— which Trump called a “fake story”—follows the news that many official documents turned over to the House Jan. 6 select committee had been ripped up and taped back together. Last week, we also learned that after a prolonged fight with the National Archives, Trump relinquished 15 boxes of official records he’d taken to Mar-a-Lago, including some marked “top secret.” The Archives referred that apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act to the Justice Department.
What great irony, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. When former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton deleted emails she said were private in 2016, an indignant Trump proclaimed, “People who have nothing to hide don’t...destroy evidence to keep it from being publicly archived as required under federal law.” Now inquiring minds would like to know what it was that Trump was hiding when he deliberately and persistently ripped up, flushed, and stole so many documents. Like so many Trump scandals, this news “astonished nobody,” said Jack Shafer in Politico. Before and during his presidency, Trump habitually cheated, lied, and brazenly defied laws and norms, assuming he’d never be punished. “Trump, like [Richard] Nixon, has taught us that the honor system can’t work if the president has no innate sense of honor.”
Trump might finally pay a price for his arrogance, said Chris Truax in The Bulwark. Under federal law, it’s a felony to “conceal, remove, mutilate, obliterate, or destroy a federal record.” Anyone convicted under that statute is disqualified from ever again holding public office—which would rule out another Trump run in 2024. To get a conviction, the Justice Department would have to prove that Trump knew he was breaking the law when he destroyed documents—but that shouldn’t be hard. Trump was “repeatedly warned that tearing up documents was illegal” by White House counsel Don McGahn and his first two chiefs of staff, Reince Priebus and John Kelly. Trump’s only truthful defense would be that “he believed that laws like the one he violated were for little people and not for him.”