The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-13)

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A

going to get in trouble because he’s the president of the United States.” Grisham, the author of “I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House,” recalled one instance in which she expressed concern about violat- ing the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in some forms of political activity. Grisham said that Trump told her: “Who’s the boss of the Hatch Act? It’s me. So say whatever you want.” That cavalier attitude about the rules extended to Trump’s treatment of documents, which he rou- tinely ripped up and threw away, forcing aides to retrieve them and send them to the White House Office of Records Management to be taped back together to comply with the Presidential Records Act, which dates to 1978. Trump had a ripping process so distinctive that several aides in- stantly recalled it — two large, clean tears that left paper in quar- ters — and the remnants were strewn on desks, in trash cans and on floors, from the Oval Office to Air Force One. As president, Trump also regularly retired to his private residence with reams of official documents, often leaving them to pile up until records staff came searching for them. When the Archives sent a tranche of documents to the House select committee investi- gating the Jan. 6 insurrection, some of them had been ripped up and taped back together. And some no longer existed at all; when the committee requested certain documents focused on Trump’s campaign to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election results, some of the relevant materi-

als had already been shredded, according to a former senior administration official. A forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Hab- erman also reports that while Trump was president, White House residence staff members from time to time found clumps of paper clogging a toilet, leading them to believe that Trump was flushing documents. Trump was warned by his first two chiefs of staff — Reince Prie- bus and John F. Kelly — about complying with the records act, as well as by Donald McGahn, his White House counsel. And in 2020, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ripped up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union address after he de- livered it, Trump seemed to exhib- it at least some awareness of the Presidential Records Act, incor- rectly claiming Pelosi had com- mitted a crime. “I thought it was a terrible thing when she ripped up the speech,” Trump said at the time. “First of all, it’s an official document. You’re not allowed. It’s illegal what she did. She broke the law.” This past week, The Washing- ton Post reported that Archives officials — suspecting that Trump may have violated laws dealing with the handling of government documents — asked the Justice Department to examine the issue. It is unclear whether the department will launch a full investigation, but the query prompted dis- cussions between federal law en- forcement officials about whether they should investigate Trump for a possible crime, though such a prosecution would face a high le- gal bar. Trump’s haphazard treatment

of documents, including sensitive ones, continued throughout his administration, right up until his frenzied and begrudging depar- ture. Trump — who spent the weeks after Election Day furiously work- ing to overturn the results of a free and fair election — procrastinated packing to leave until the very last minute. His obsession with falsely claiming the election was stolen also made his staff reluctant to broach the question of packing, fearful that doing so would draw his ire, said one former White House official, speaking anony- mously to share details of private conversations. Ultimately, Trump arrived at Mar-a-Lago with the array of documents and other items that should have been turned over to the Archives. In a statement, the Archives said Trump’s representa- tives have said they are “continuing to search” for documents that belong to the government. As Trump settled into his post- presidency, officials from the Ar- chives realized that they had nev- er received certain prominent documents from his White House — some of them totems of the many scandals and controversies that clouded his four years in office. Among the gifts, mementos and papers that were sent back: correspondence with North Ko- rean leader Kim Jong Un, which Trump had once touted as “love letters”; a letter that President Barack Obama left for Trump, part of an Inauguration Day tradi- tion in which the outgoing president leaves a warm missive for his successor; and a National Weath- er Service map of Hurricane Dorian, which Trump had altered

with a black Sharpie in a widely mocked attempt to claim he had not been wrong about the storm’s path. Grisham said she believes that Trump deliberately kept certain keepsakes, regardless of the Presi- dential Records Act. “He was be- yond proud of those Kim Jong Un letters,” she said. “He talked about them all the time, showed them to people all the time. He took those letters because he wanted them.” Trump also brought with him to Mar-a-Lago a number of gifts he had received while president — a concern aides had flagged in the final weeks of his administration, because gift rules dictate that most such presents also need to be given to the Archives. A model of an Air Force One redesign he had proposed — re- painting the baby-blue plane with in bold hues of red, white and blue — now sits on a coffee table in the middle of his members-only club’s sumptuous lobby room. In his private Mar-a-Lago office, Trump has displayed a minia- ture version of one of the black slats from the wall he promised to build at the nation’s southern bor- der, and which became a rallying cry for him and his conservative base. Also hanging there is a high- quality laser print of “The Repub- lican Club” by artist Andy Thom- as, which depicts a trim-looking Trump — clad in his signature red tie and drinking a Diet Coke — chatting with former Republican presidents. The painting was given to him by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and previously hung in the West Wing. On a different part of the wall is another large photo — of Marine One hovering in front of Mount Rushmore, when the

former president visited there to celebrate the Fourth of July — that previously hung in the hallway of the West Wing. “The Clintons had to return gifts, and there were lots of presidents who didn’t write anything down, or who didn’t keep emails, but I don’t know of a story since 1978 of a president leaving with this much material,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. “I can’t give you someone worse than Trump.” With the boxes’ journey coming to a close, Trump advisers have scrambled to do damage control. They have asked the Archives to dispute the spate of recent report- ing on the myriad ways Trump ignored the Presidential Records Act and to declare that Trump has done nothing wrong, according to two people familiar with the en- treaties, speaking a nonymously to share details of private discus- sions. But so far, the Archives has declined. “We pursue the return of records — Presidential or federal — whenever we learn that records have been improperly removed or have not been appropriately transferred to official accounts,” Archivist of the United States Da- vid S. Ferriero wrote in a note to employees this past week. “ ... Whether through the creation of adequate and proper documentation, sound records management practices, the preservation of records, or their timely transfer to the National Archives at the end of an administration, there should be no question as to the need for both diligence and vigilance.”

Matt Zapotosky and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Trump was noticeably secretive
about the packing process, and
top aides and longtime adminis-
trative staffers did not see the
contents, the people said.
Finally, on Jan. 17, a contractor
dispatched by the Archives ar-
rived at Mar-a-Lago to load the
boxes into a truck and transport
them a thousand miles north,
eventually landing at a sensitive
compartmented information fa-
cility — known as a SCIF — in the
greater Washington area. Trump’s
assistant had been looped in on
the emails handling the logistics,
and both Trump’s team and the
National Archives described the
in-person handover as amicable.
Trump said in a statement it was
“without conflict” and “very
friendly.”
“This unfortunate attempt by
the media to twist a story, along
with the help of anonymous
sources, is just another sensation-
alized distraction of an otherwise
uneventful effort to persevere the
legacy of President Trump and a
good faith effort to ensure the
fulfillment of the Presidential
Records Act,” Trump spokesman
Taylor Budowich said in a state-
ment Saturday. “Sadly, the busi-
ness of ‘news’ has become reliant
on the next manufactured Trump
‘investigation,’ and so here we are.
It’s a disgrace.”
The tale of these 15 boxes — and
the material contained within —
underscores how defiantly and in-
discriminately Trump violated
the records law, which requires
that the White House preserve all
written communication related to
a president’s official duties and
then turn it over to the National
Archives. Instead, starting in his
presidency and continuing into
his post-presidency, documents
both classified and mundane — as
well as official gifts, which are
governed by similarly stringent
rules — were treated with the
same disregard and enveloped in
the same chaos that characterized
his term in office.
A trucking administrator at
Bennett, a Georgia transportation
firm that handles a lot of govern-
ment contracts, said that under
traditional circumstances, ship-
ment of these sorts of materials
would be handled through a se-
cure transfer — including GPS
tracking of the vehicle and a team
trained to handle sensitive infor-
mation.
But it remains unclear what
protocols were followed because,
as one person familiar with the
transfer said, “Nothing about this
is normal.” Officials have not iden-
tified what company handled the
Mar-a-Lago shipment.
“He would roll his eyes at the
rules, so we did, too,” said Stepha-
nie Grisham, the former Trump
White House press secretary who
has become an outspoken Trump
critic since the Jan. 6 insurrection
on the U.S. Capitol. “We weren’t

TRUMP FROM A

Recovering

papers was

ordeal for

The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-13)

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