Rumors that Donald Trump flushed important documents down the toilet during his presidency have been around for some time. But now there are photos.
The allegations against Trump that he had official documents disappeared into toilets became widely publicized at the beginning of the year. But New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Habermans has now published photos to support the rumor.
With the photos, she wants to substantiate the allegations made in her forthcoming book that during Trump’s tenure, White House employees regularly found torn printed paper in the presidential toilets, which in some cases even blocked them.
The photos were distributed on Monday (local time) by the media portal “Axios”. The pictures show small snippets in a toilet, according to reports in the White House and the other time on a trip abroad. These may actually be notes written by Trump, as the letters on the scraps of paper resemble his handwriting. They are also written with a thick marker, which Trump always preferred to a fountain pen.
This could be problematic for Trump, since the destruction of a US President’s records could potentially be illegal. Normally, the National Archives keep documents of the Presidents. This had already confirmed in January that some of the documents it had received from the Trump administration had been torn up and taped back together.
“It was an aggravation of Trump’s longstanding habit of tearing up documents required to be retained under the Presidential Records Act,” Haberman told Axios.
“That Mr. Trump disposed of documents in this manner was not widely known in the West Wing, but some staffers were aware of the habit as he engaged in it repeatedly,” she said.
Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich denied the authenticity of the photos to Axios: “You must be pretty desperate to sell books when pictures of paper in a toilet bowl are part of your promotional plan.”
