Donald Trump was told the law required him to preserve White House materials. He spent four years literally tearing them up anyway. It's worth asking why.
After Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address in 2020, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could hardly contain her disgust with the then-president’s avalanche of lies. In fact, the California Democrat, seated behind Trump, was seen literally tearing her copy of the address as a way of registering her revulsion.
Exactly two years ago today, it led the Republican to make a bizarre claim. “t’s an official document,” the then-president told reporters. “You’re not allowed. It’s illegal what she did. She broke the law.”
As legal experts — and those in touch with common sense — were quick to point out, Trump’s argument was utterly bonkers. Pelosi was handed a photocopy of a speech. She could tear it up, light it on fire, turn it into paper airplanes, or anything else she chose. There were no legal requirements forcing the Speaker to preserve the photocopy or treat it with any deference.
But Trump’s confusion didn’t come out of nowhere. He was trying to make an argument about the Presidential Records Act, which really does create a legal requirement about the preservation and maintenance of presidential materials. It doesn’t apply to photocopies handed to other people, but the federal law does apply to all kinds of official White House documents.
Trump knew this to be true because his aides kept telling him about the law — and they kept telling him about the law because the Republican kept ignoring it.
In June 2018, Politico first reported that Trump had an “enduring habit” of ripping up papers, which meant there was an entire White House department dedicated to the task of retrieving the pieces, literally taping them back together again, and then passing them along to the National Archives. This wasn’t especially easy: The article added that in some instances, the then-president would tear documents “into pieces so small they looked like confetti.”
This became relevant anew last week, when we learned that the National Archives turned over materials to the Jan. 6 committee, and some of the documents had been torn up by the former president.
The articles created bookends of sorts: It became clear that Trump started and ended his presidency ignoring the Presidential Records Act. And what about the time in between? The Washington Post reported over the weekend:
The Post’s reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that Trump’s shredding habits were “far more widespread and indiscriminate than previously known and — despite multiple admonishments — extended throughout his presidency, resulting in special practices to deal with the torn fragments.”
This morning, the Post advanced its own reporting, noting that officials with the National Archives and Records Administration had to go to Mar-a-Lago last month in order to retrieve documents — materials that were supposed to have been turned over to the records-keeping agency — that Trump had “improperly removed.”
The Republican’s team denied there was anything nefarious about this, though they conceded the improperly removed items included correspondence with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
In fairness, other modern presidents have also had some missteps involving the Archives and the records act, but the Post’s articleadded, “One person familiar with the transfer characterized it as ‘out of the ordinary.... [T]he National Archives and Records Administration] has never had that kind of volume transfer after the fact like this.’”
A lawyer who worked in the White House Counsel’s Office under Barack Obama added, “Things that are national security sensitive or very clearly government documents should have been a part of a first sweep — so the fact that it’s been this long doesn’t reflect well on [Trump]. Why has it taken for a year for these boxes to get there? And are there more boxes?”
Those need not be rhetorical questions.
Indeed, it’s worth taking stock of why revelations like these matter. First, the Presidential Records Act exists for a reason, and it’s a problem that Trump treated it as an inconvenience to be ignored. “The only way that a president can really be held accountable long term is to preserve a record about who said what, who did what, what policies were encouraged or adopted, and that is such an important part of the long-term scope of accountability — beyond just elections and campaigns,” presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky told the Post.
There’s also a degree of irony to all of this. Not only did Trump falsely accuse Pelosi of violating the Presidential Records Act, he also ran a presidential campaign based on accusing Hillary Clinton of not properly preserving State Department emails.
After he won, the Republican proceeded to spend four years ignoring federal law and tearing official White House documents into pieces the size of confetti.
But hanging overhead is the question of why Trump developed this habit. Some of the sourcing for the Post’s reporting made it sound as if it could be benign: The then-president would tear paper as a way of punctuating a conversation or a meeting.
A more realistic explanation is that Trump — who also implored White House lawyers not to take notes around him — simply didn’t want official records of his actions, so he routinely tried to destroy documents, indifferent to the law.
“He didn’t want a record of anything,” a former senior Trump official explained succinctly.
www.msnbc.com
After Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address in 2020, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could hardly contain her disgust with the then-president’s avalanche of lies. In fact, the California Democrat, seated behind Trump, was seen literally tearing her copy of the address as a way of registering her revulsion.
Exactly two years ago today, it led the Republican to make a bizarre claim. “t’s an official document,” the then-president told reporters. “You’re not allowed. It’s illegal what she did. She broke the law.”
As legal experts — and those in touch with common sense — were quick to point out, Trump’s argument was utterly bonkers. Pelosi was handed a photocopy of a speech. She could tear it up, light it on fire, turn it into paper airplanes, or anything else she chose. There were no legal requirements forcing the Speaker to preserve the photocopy or treat it with any deference.
But Trump’s confusion didn’t come out of nowhere. He was trying to make an argument about the Presidential Records Act, which really does create a legal requirement about the preservation and maintenance of presidential materials. It doesn’t apply to photocopies handed to other people, but the federal law does apply to all kinds of official White House documents.
Trump knew this to be true because his aides kept telling him about the law — and they kept telling him about the law because the Republican kept ignoring it.
In June 2018, Politico first reported that Trump had an “enduring habit” of ripping up papers, which meant there was an entire White House department dedicated to the task of retrieving the pieces, literally taping them back together again, and then passing them along to the National Archives. This wasn’t especially easy: The article added that in some instances, the then-president would tear documents “into pieces so small they looked like confetti.”
This became relevant anew last week, when we learned that the National Archives turned over materials to the Jan. 6 committee, and some of the documents had been torn up by the former president.
The articles created bookends of sorts: It became clear that Trump started and ended his presidency ignoring the Presidential Records Act. And what about the time in between? The Washington Post reported over the weekend:
The article added that the Republican was “relentless” in tearing up documents, even after he was directed to stop by “at least two chiefs of staff and the White House counsel.”
The Post’s reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that Trump’s shredding habits were “far more widespread and indiscriminate than previously known and — despite multiple admonishments — extended throughout his presidency, resulting in special practices to deal with the torn fragments.”
This morning, the Post advanced its own reporting, noting that officials with the National Archives and Records Administration had to go to Mar-a-Lago last month in order to retrieve documents — materials that were supposed to have been turned over to the records-keeping agency — that Trump had “improperly removed.”
The Republican’s team denied there was anything nefarious about this, though they conceded the improperly removed items included correspondence with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
In fairness, other modern presidents have also had some missteps involving the Archives and the records act, but the Post’s articleadded, “One person familiar with the transfer characterized it as ‘out of the ordinary.... [T]he National Archives and Records Administration] has never had that kind of volume transfer after the fact like this.’”
A lawyer who worked in the White House Counsel’s Office under Barack Obama added, “Things that are national security sensitive or very clearly government documents should have been a part of a first sweep — so the fact that it’s been this long doesn’t reflect well on [Trump]. Why has it taken for a year for these boxes to get there? And are there more boxes?”
Those need not be rhetorical questions.
Indeed, it’s worth taking stock of why revelations like these matter. First, the Presidential Records Act exists for a reason, and it’s a problem that Trump treated it as an inconvenience to be ignored. “The only way that a president can really be held accountable long term is to preserve a record about who said what, who did what, what policies were encouraged or adopted, and that is such an important part of the long-term scope of accountability — beyond just elections and campaigns,” presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky told the Post.
There’s also a degree of irony to all of this. Not only did Trump falsely accuse Pelosi of violating the Presidential Records Act, he also ran a presidential campaign based on accusing Hillary Clinton of not properly preserving State Department emails.
After he won, the Republican proceeded to spend four years ignoring federal law and tearing official White House documents into pieces the size of confetti.
But hanging overhead is the question of why Trump developed this habit. Some of the sourcing for the Post’s reporting made it sound as if it could be benign: The then-president would tear paper as a way of punctuating a conversation or a meeting.
A more realistic explanation is that Trump — who also implored White House lawyers not to take notes around him — simply didn’t want official records of his actions, so he routinely tried to destroy documents, indifferent to the law.
“He didn’t want a record of anything,” a former senior Trump official explained succinctly.
Why it matters that Trump literally tore up White House documents
Donald Trump was told the law required him to preserve White House materials. He spent four years literally tearing them up anyway. It's worth asking why.
