White House Aide Claims Donald Trump Ripped Official Documents After Reading Them

Former President Donald Trump is awaiting trial on charges of hoarding presidential documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. The Republican leader has been accused of the destruction of documents during his administration; the Presidential Records Act prohibits a president from destroying official documents that are a part of the national archive. As per Newsweek, on June 10, 2022, a White House staffer testified before a January 6 House committee that Trump frequently ripped documents after reading them. As soon as a committee member enquired: "Do you remember the president ever tearing up or destroying documents that he had seen?" The employee responded: "That's typically what he would do once he's finished with a document. He would tear everything, tear newspapers, tear photos." 

The White House staffer added: "He liked to look at pictures and he would just tear it once he's done looking at it and just throw it on the floor." The staffer's evidence was gathered for the congressional January 6 committee's 18-month investigation, during which time more than 1,000 witnesses were questioned. The staffer also stated to the committee that, on January 6, 2021, the day of the Trump supporters' incursion into the Capitol building, he had no memory of the former President destroying any documents. The testimony has since been made public and has undergone extensive redaction.

Meanwhile, in 2022, Maggie Haberman, a New York Times journalist and CNN contributor, published some shocking images in her book, Confidence Man. The images showcased official documents torn apart and flushed into the toilet. As per CNN, Trump, during his time at the White House, occasionally flushed papers down the residence's toilets, a detail that was subsequently revealed when repairmen were called to clear the clogged toilets. 

“Who knows what this paper was? Only he would know and presumably whoever was dealing with it, but the important point is about the records,” Haberman told during a segment of New Day with John Berman and Brianna Keilar back then. “It is absolutely a violation of the act,” Courtney Chartier, President of the Society of American Archivists, told The Independent in 2022. “There is no ignorance of these laws. There are White House manuals about the maintenance of these records.” 

"That Mr. Trump was discarding documents this way was not widely known within the West Wing, but some aides were aware of the habit, which he engaged in repeatedly," Haberman told Axios in 2022. "It was an extension of Trump’s term-long habit of ripping up documents that were supposed to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act." Trump has since then refuted the allegations, calling it “categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book." White House staffers were ordered to tape up records that were considered especially critical due to Trump's widespread destruction of documentation.