Donald Trump has apparently been warned numerous times that shredding documents is a violation of federal laws that require presidential documents be preserved. Apparently U.S. taxpayers are now paying historians at the presidential records office to sit around with a Costco-sized box of scotch tape to reconstruct the documents. From Politico:
Solomon Lartey spent the first five months of the Trump administration working in the Old Executive Office Building, standing over a desk with scraps of paper spread out in front of him.
Lartey, who earned an annual salary of $65,969 as a records management analyst, was a career government official with close to 30 years under his belt. But he had never seen anything like this in any previous administration he had worked for. He had never had to tape the president’s papers back together again.
His babysitters cannot get him to stop, so everyone has simply given up and now they have to sift through his trash to send the documents over for a team to put them back together.
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.
Staffers had the fragments of paper collected from the Oval Office as well as the private residence and send it over to records management across the street from the White House for Lartey and his colleagues to reassemble.
The entire team has been consumed with this daily project of reconstructing and preserving these documents. They say it is degrading.
One of his colleagues, Reginald Young Jr., who worked as a senior records management analyst, said that during over two decades of government service, he had never been asked to do such a thing.
“We had to endure this under the Trump administration,” Young said. “I’m looking at my director, and saying, ‘Are you guys serious?’ We’re making more than $60,000 a year, we need to be doing far more important things than this. It felt like the lowest form of work you can take on without having to empty the trash cans.”
How do we know everything is even making it over to the records office? Where is the congressional hearing on this matter? It’s fair to have a congressional inquiry. These records belong to the people, not to Donald Trump. That’s the reason federal law demands they be preserved.