The House Oversight Committee is seeking more information about Donald Trump’s illegal mishandling of White House records, including taking 15 boxes of materials to Mar-a-Lago, at least some containing top-secret documents, and destroying documents by tearing them up, flushing them down toilets, and even eating them.
“I am deeply concerned that former President Trump may have violated the law through his intentional efforts to remove and destroy records that belong to the American people,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the committee, wrote in a letter to National Archivist David Ferriero, ABC News reports. “This Committee plans to get to the bottom of what happened and assess whether further action is needed to prevent the destruction of additional presidential records and recover those records that are still missing.”
Maloney is asking the National Archives for a “detailed” inventory of the boxes Trump took to Mar-a-Lago, as well as of “all presidential records” that the agency learned Trump had “torn up, destroyed, mutilated, or attempted to tear up, destroy, or mutilate.” Maloney further asked for any information on workers “finding paper in a toilet in the White House,” following reports that flushing was another way Trump destroyed documents.
The classified documents taken to Mar-a-Lago include extremely sensitive “records that only a very few have clearances” to view, a source told The Washington Post. The House Oversight Committee has notified the Justice Department about those classified records, though Attorney General Merrick Garland has not offered more information about his plans than that “we will do what we always do under these circumstances—look at the facts and the law and take it from there.”
Trump has denied the document-destruction-and-misconduct allegations, but his latest denial seems to miss the point.
“The media’s characterization of my relationship with [the National Archives and Records Administration] is Fake News. It was exactly the opposite!” Trump said in a statement to ABC News. “It was a great honor to work with NARA to help formally preserve the Trump Legacy.”
Of course, Trump wants to preserve the Trump Legacy. But it’s safe to say there are things he doesn’t want to be included in that legacy, and “I worked with them to preserve the stuff I thought made me look good” doesn’t exactly answer what happened to the stuff that didn’t make him look good.
Right now, what he has to worry about—when it comes to presidential records, anyway—is the House Oversight Committee’s expanding investigation, which is also looking into the Trump White House’s failure to preserve some social media records and the use by some staff of non-official accounts for official business. The select committee investigating Jan. 6 is interested in some of Trump’s documents destruction as well, where it relates to events surrounding the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
