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Yeah, No. It’s WAAAAY more than a “process crime” …
It’s kind of a “way of life” in MAGA-world. Remember all those wiped phones and texts by Team-Trump? There’s kind of a pattern here.
Transparent — they were not. Leave No Trace — was their prime directive.
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Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, Lartey and his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, he said, “like a jigsaw puzzle.” Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.
It was a painstaking process that was the result of a clash between legal requirements to preserve White House records and President Donald Trump’s odd and enduring habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them — what some people described as his unofficial “filing system.”
Under the Presidential Records Act [PRA], the White House must preserve all memos, letters, emails and papers that the president touches, sending them to the National Archives for safekeeping as historical records.
But White House aides realized early on that they were unable to stop Trump from ripping up paper after he was done with it and throwing it in the trash or on the floor, according to people familiar with the practice. Instead, they chose to clean it up for him, in order to make sure that the president wasn’t violating the law.
www.politico.com — 06/10/2018
Donald Trump’s well-known habit of ripping up documents did not stop once he entered the White House, where staff reportedly resorted to taping together piles of shredded paper. But the practice was “far more widespread and indiscriminate than previously known” and extended throughout his four years in office, according to The Washington Post.
White House documents – from schedules to sensitive memos – were regularly ripped into quarters and tossed into trash bins or on the floor of Air Force One, or stuffed into “burn bags” to be incinerated at the Pentagon, only for aides to sort through the contents to determine which bits needed to be preserved under federal law, the newspaper reported.
www.independent.co.uk — 02/07/2022
Trump developed adjunct techniques. Burn bags apparently were one. Former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman even claimed in her 2018 book about the Trump White House that she saw him “put a note in his mouth.” She was shocked to see a known germophobe “chewing and swallowing the paper. It must have been something very, very sensitive.”
thehill.com — 02/15/2022
Earlier this year, Axios reported a shocking scoop from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman's forthcoming book: Former President Donald Trump would allegedly, on occasion, clog a toilet with wads of paper he was seemingly attempting to flush and destroy, according to White House residence staff.
At the time, Trump denied the reports. But now ... well, now there are photos.
The National Archives and Records Administration [NARA] retrieved 15 boxes of records from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in January, NARA has confirmed.
Some of the other records that NARA had received earlier from the Trump administration had been torn up by the former president and, in some cases, taped back together by records management officials at the White House, according to a NARA statement issued on Jan. 31.
[...]
The Presidential Records Act, or PRA, governs the maintenance of presidential records. It was passed in 1978, after former President Richard Nixon sought to destroy recordings made in the White House that documented activities related to the Watergate scandal, David S. Ferriero, archivist of the United States who is in charge of NARA, explained in a 2017 publication for the National Archives.
When a president leaves office, the archivist takes custody of the records from that administration and is responsible for their preservation and for providing access to the public, according to a Congressional Research Service report.
“The Presidential Records Act requires that all records created by presidents be turned over to the National Archives at the end of their administrations,” NARA said in its Jan. 31 statement.
[...]
“A president has no legal right to tear up, shred, or otherwise dispose of copies of records that he creates or receives while in office (including his own notes or annotations on documents concerning official business),” Baron said.
[...]
Baron also said that a president doesn’t have “the right to decide for himself that he will take boxes containing presidential records to his own residence after he leaves office, even if it is allegedly for the purpose of transferring them to a presidential library.”
www.factcheck.org — 02/18/2022
There are several provisions of federal criminal law imposing liability on officials who violate the PRA and the FRA [Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act]. 18 U.S.C. § 641 makes it a felony to, among other things, dispose of any record that belongs to the United States. 18 U.S.C. § 1361 makes it a felony to injure property of the United States.
More specific to records, 18 U.S.C. § 2071 makes it a felony to willfully and unlawfully remove, mutilate or destroy—or to attempt to remove, mutilate or destroy—any record deposited in any public office or with any public officer of the United States. That same provision also makes it a felony for anyone having custody of such records to remove, mutilate or destroy those records and imposes severe consequences: a violation requires the individual to “forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”
In addition to these provisions, 18 U.S.C. § 1505 makes it a felony for individuals to obstruct congressional investigations.
Under a straightforward reading of any of these statutes, Trump (and those who knowingly helped him destroy presidential records) could well be held liable for violations of criminal law. Note that at least some courts have held that the statutes prohibiting the destruction of public records are specific intent crimes, meaning that violators must know they are breaking the law to be convicted. But that should not be an obstacle here, as reporting indicates Trump and his aides were specifically and repeatedly warned about violating the PRA.
www.lawfareblog.com — 02/18/2022
And another clear indication of the former resident’s corrupt intent … to break the provisions of the Presidential Records Act . Nixon’s got nothing over this law-breaker ...
[Dimwit] defends daughter's emails
Didn’t hide them like Clinton, he says
Trump dismissed comparisons of his daughter to Hillary Clinton, whom he criticized throughout the 2016 presidential campaign for use of a personal email server for her work as secretary of state in former President Barack Obama's administration.
"They weren't classified like Hillary Clinton. They weren't deleted like Hillary Clinton, who deleted 33,000. [Ivanka] wasn't doing anything to hide her emails. I looked at it just very briefly today and the presidential records -- they're all in presidential records. There was no hiding," Trump told reporters at the White House as he departed for Florida.
www.arkansasonline.com — Nov 21, 2018
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