Donald Trump Really Didn’t Want Anyone To See His High School Grades Either
Last week Michael Cohen made headlines when he revealed that Donald Trump had instructed him to ensure that the colleges and universities he attended did not reveal his transcripts or test scores.
Trump allegedly took similar precautions to protect his high school performance as well, TheChicago Tribune reports.
In 2011, Trump was aggressively challenging Barack Obama, then president, to reveal his own school records to demonstrate that he was not “a terrible student.” However, Trump himself apparently took precautions to make sure his own records remained private.
“How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it,” Trump was quoted in an Associated Press story submitted to the congressional committee by Cohen. “Let him show his records.”
Evan Jones, who was then headmaster of the New York Military Academy which Trump attended, has recollected the incident.
“[Jeffery Coverdale, the superintendent of the 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,” Jones recalled. “He said, ‘You need to go grab that record and deliver it to me because I need to deliver it to them.'”
Coverdale confirmed the exchange, but indicated that he did not comply with the request in full, taking steps to protect the records but refusing to hand them over to the individuals making the request.
“I moved them elsewhere on campus, where they could not be released. It’s the only time I ever moved an alumnus’s records,” he said in an interview earlier this week.
Former officials of the military academy where Trump went to high school say that wealthy alumni directed them to retrieve, remove and hide Trump's academic records.
The request came in 2011, days after Trump challenged Obama to "show his records." https://t.co/ec6ohUa4bS
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 5, 2019
Despite no public accounting of Trump’s high school performance, he has in the past indicated that he excelled at the academy. In a 2016 interview with The Washington Post, Trump said that he in fact “did very well under the military system” and claimed “I became one of the top guys at the whole school.”
Trump’s apparent discomfort with sharing his school records has once again risen to national attention following Cohen’s recent testimony.
As The Inquisitr reported, Cohen claimed to have sent letters threatening multiple school with consequences should Trump’s grades become public. Targets of Cohen’s pressure included Fordham University and the College Board, who manages the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
Cohen also claimed to send a similar letter to the military academy.
“When I say conman, I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores,” Cohen said in sworn testimony.
