Donald Trump (left), Maggie Haberman.Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty; William B. Plowman/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty
Reporter Maggie Haberman is doubling down on her previous claims thatDonald Trumpwould flush important documents down the toilet while he was in office —showing photosthat she says depict handwritten documents resting in toilet bowls.
On Monday, theNew York Timesreporter and CNN contributor released two images in which torn-up pieces of papers — with what appears to be Trump’s distinctive handwriting in black marker — can be seen in toilets.
Haberman told CNN the images came from a Trump White House source; one was taken of a White House toilet and the other was during an overseas trip, she said.
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“Who knows what this paper was? Only he would know and presumably whoever was dealing with it, but the important point is about the records,” Haberman said in an interview with CNN’s John Berman and Brianna Keilar onNew Day.
According to the Presidential Records Act, created in the years following President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal,the president must preserve all records created during their tenureso that they can be handed over to the National Archives and Records Administration.
“I learned that staff in the White House residence would periodically find the toilet clogged, the engineer would have to come and fix it and what the engineer would find would be wads of, you know, clumped up, wet, printed paper, meaning it was not toilet paper, this was either notes or some other piece of paper that they believed he had thrown down the toilet,“Haberman said in February.
She continued: “What it could be, Brianna, could be anybody’s guess. It could be Post-its, it could be notes he wrote to himself, it could be other things. But certainly does add, as you said, another dimension to what we know about how he handled material in the White House.”
According to her reporting, the clogged toilets were “not an isolated incident” and they stemmed from Trump’s White House bathroom.
Trump, 76, has previously denied Haberman’s reporting and the claims made in her forthcoming book,ConfidenceMan, a biography of the former president.
Some of those ripped-up and reconstructed documents were reportedly among the more than 700 pages turned over to lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riots,TheWashington Postreported.
In aninterview on MSNBC in February, formerApprenticestar and Trump aide-turned-enemyOmarosa Manigault Newmanalso said Trump made a “habit” of tearing up White House documents.
“His habit of tearing these things up … my heart truly goes out to the people responsible for going in the trash bins [and] recovering these things. But there are certainly things that I’m sure cannot be accounted for because Donald Trump became very very aware that a lot of these sensitive documents would at some point be made public,” Newman said on MSNBC.
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Newman also claimed that she once saw Trump “chewing” a document he had just torn up after meeting with his former attorney Michael Cohen in the Oval Office.
“After [Trump attorney] Michael Cohen left the office and I walked in to the Oval, Donald — in my view — was chewing what he had just torn up,” she said, adding, “It was very bizarre because he is a germophobe he never puts paper in his mouth.”
source: people.com
