THRONE: Trump tried to flush public records away, says new book
Richard Nixon was infamously brought down by the antics of the White House “plumbers” — the appellation given to the covert Special Investigations Unit that masterminded the Watergate break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.
Now another set of White House plumbers — the kind equipped with wrenches, plungers, and snakes — may lead to the downfall and prosecution of Donald Trump.
As the story of the 15 boxes of documents retrieved by the National Archives from Mar-a-Lago — where they were illegally moved by Trump when he left office — gets increasingly weirder, Axios is reporting on information gleaned from Confidence Man, the soon-to-be-published book from The New York Times White House Correspondent Maggie Haberman that claims that “staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper.”
The report adds a new dimension of foul-smelling behavior to Trump’s alleged violations of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which grew even more serious yesterday with the disclosure by The New York Times that the National Archives had discovered potentially classified material in the boxes retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.
While there is no way currently to know whether the toilet-clogging papers in the private residence section of the White House contained classified or sensitive information, the revelation —coupled with the reports that Trump staffers regularly had to tape documents back together after the then-president tore them up in violation of document preservation statutes — could lead to Donald Trump being banned from running for president again if he is found to have intentionally destroyed government records.
Trump would have a difficult time claiming ignorance of the laws surrounding government documents given that he made Hillary Clinton’s handling of her official correspondence on a private email server the centerpiece of his 2016 campaign against her that won him the presidency.
While the story of the document-clogged White House toilets brings to mind the frantic flushing of a drug dealer as the DEA is breaking down their door with a no-knock warrant, it does finally provide an explanation for the rants that Trump regularly spewed during his administration complaining about low-flush toilets that require “flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times” in order to wash away his dirty business.
Those reams of white bond laser printer paper simply were not meant to be flushed down the toilet.
Whoever those people who served as White House plumbers during the Trump Administration need to come forward and reveal the nature of the documents they retrieved from the impacted cesspools under 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
If the information they provide leads to Trump being plunged into a world of legal trouble and banned from holding future public office, someone nominate them for a Congressional Medal of Honor.
You can watch Maggie Haberman of The New York Times discuss her straight poop scoop direct from the White House water closet in this clip from a CNN interview this morning.
"I learned that staff in the White House residence would periodically find the toilet clogged … and what the engineer would find would be wads of … either notes or some other piece of paper that, you know, they believe [Trump] had thrown down the toilet." – @maggieNYT pic.twitter.com/izJ53mD50S
— New Day (@NewDay) February 10, 2022
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Original reporting by Mike Allen at Axios and by Maggie Haberman at The New York Times.
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Editor’s Note: The cover image uses a stock photograph and a photo of commercially available toilet paper and is not literally Donald Trump’s toilet.
