White House staff during the Trump administration sometimes found wads of paper clogging a toilet and believed then-President Donald Trump was responsible for flushing the paper, a new book claims.
The detail comes in New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming book about Trump and was first reported by Axios Thursday. Haberman told CNN Thursday that this happened multiple times.
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“The engineer would have to come and fix [the toilet], and what the engineer would find would be clods of wet, printed paper,” Haberman told CNN Thursday. “Meaning it was not toilet paper. It was notes or some other piece of paper they believe he had thrown down the toilet.”
Asked where the paper was found, Haberman told CNN: “It was in the pipes… this was his bathroom.”
Trump denied the story Thursday. “Another fake story, that I flushed papers and documents down a White House toilet, is categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book,” Trump said in a statement.
The new details about the White House’s plumbing problem comes just days after former White House aide and ‘The Apprentice’ contestant Omarosa Manigault Newman told MSNBC that Trump “loved to tear up” documents and that she once saw the former president “chewing” White House documents after a meeting with his then-lawyer Michael Cohen.
“I walked back in and I saw Donald Trump, he was very concerned about whatever was exchanged and shared, and whatever was on this particular paper appeared to be of great concern to him,” Newman said, recounting a story from her 2018 book about working for Trump. “So he tore it up like he normally does, but then he put it in his mouth… it was very bizarre because he is a germaphobe, he never puts paper in his mouth.”
The former president was well-known for his tendency to destroy documents. In 2018, Politico reported on two federal records management analysts whose job became taping back together documents Trump had ripped into tiny pieces, so they could be sent to the National Archives. White House documents must be preserved under the Presidential Records Act, which was passed after the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon.
The National Archives and Records Administration has asked the Justice Department to investigate Trump’s handling of records after the agency received 15 boxes of documents from Trump last month, the Washington Post reported Wednesday. The National Archives believed some of the information in those documents was classified, according to the New York Times.
That’s not all of Trump’s apparent record-keeping problems. The House Jan. 6 committee has found gaps in the White House telephone logs from the day of the Capitol riot, the New York Times reported Thursday.
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