- A former White House chief of staff told CNN he saw Donald Trump tearing up official documents.
- “You’re not supposed to do this, but there’s a way to fix it,” Mick Mulvaney said.
- Aides said Trump had such a distinct extraction style that they knew when he destroyed a document.
Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said he saw former President Donald Trump tearing up documents while in office.
“I’ve seen the president rip documents in half. Not confidential documents, but just draft documents. You’re not supposed to do that, but there’s a way to fix it,” he said. said in an interview with CNN. “That is, you just find the pieces and glue them together.”
“I used to tear up documents in the private sector all the time,” he continued. “It’s not an indication of ill intent.”
The review of records retention under the Trump administration began in part after New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman earlier this year revealed in a forthcoming book that the president clogged a toilet by flushing the toilet torn pieces of paper on it.
Trump at the time refuse the report, calling it a “false story”. It is “categorically untrue and simply invented by a journalist for the purpose of publicizing an essentially fictional book,” Trump said.
But the accounts of former aides – including Mulvaney – differed from what Trump said.
Former Trump administration aides instantly knew when a document had been torn up by the former president, as Insider previously reported. reported.
Trump had such a distinct tearing style that has become familiar to his aides. He tore each document twice – once in the middle horizontally and once vertically – leaving the paper in four quarters. When aides saw those documents torn up like this, according to The Post, they immediately knew Trump had done it.
The former president would then leave the documents strewn on desks and in trash cans all over the White House. Documents were also strewn across the floors, and aides found them in the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One.
This month, the FBI Investigate Former President’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida and recovered 11 boxes containing classified records that Trump took with him from the White House once he left office, according to court records released Friday. Some of the boxes were clearly marked as “top secret”, Insider’s Sonam Sheth reported.
Under the Presidential Archives Acthe should have turned the files over to the agency when he left office.
But Mulvaney in the CNN interview insisted there was a system in place to make sure something like this didn’t happen.
“Staff are expected to get involved,” he said. “If the president has confidential documents on his desk at the end of a meeting, which is possible … the staff steps in to make sure all of that is gone and in place before the next meeting.”
“You can’t control the president,” Mulvaney continued. “The president is going to do what the president is going to do. But there are mechanisms inside every west wing that are working properly to make sure the law is followed, documents are kept and classified information is handled. as classified information.”