In recent weeks, the former president has been accused of deliberately neglecting some of his files before compulsorily circulating the US National Archives.
According to several US media, this federal agency has asked US Justice to launch an investigation after it had to recover fifteen boxes of documents in Florida that Donald Trump took with him when he left Washington in January 2021.
In these boxes, letters from Barack Obama and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a map of the United States that were the subject of heated exchanges with the US Weather Service.
The National Archives reassured that Republicans had no right to be left with these boxes: Under a 1978 law, any US president must remit all of his e-mails, letters, and other work documents to this agency, which Responsible for keeping them.
Asked by AFP, the National Archives and the Justice Ministry did not want to confirm or deny a request to launch an investigation on Wednesday.
– closed toilet –
But the next day, Donald Trump’s papers found themselves at the center of a new case. In an upcoming book, a star reporter for the New York Times assures that White House staffers regularly discovered piles of papers clogging toilets, prompting the president to suspect the documents were getting rid of them.
At the same time, a congressional commission responsible for overseeing federal officials announced the opening of an investigation into the archives of a former White House tenant. Its president Carolyn Maloney said she was “extremely concerned” with the practices of the former real estate mogul.
Donald Trump, already worried about managing his taxes and the way he tried to stay in power after his defeat in November 2020, wants to play down the matter.
His exchanges with the National Archives have always been “respectful” and “collaborative,” he said in a press release Thursday, refusing to pass that he could have thrown any official documents down the toilet.
He promised that some of them would one day be displayed in his presidential library.
– “witch hunt” –
Last week, the National Archives also revealed that the former leader had a habit of tearing up some of his working documents, another practice that was contrary to the 1978 law.
He said the sheets of paper sent to the archives had been “re-attached to the tapes” by “White House records management officers”, leaving the others as they were.
Some of these documents were transferred by the archives to a parliamentary committee investigating Donald Trump’s role in the attack on the Capitol launched by his supporters on January 6, 2021.
The Republican billionaire, who has repeatedly called the investigation a “witch hunt,” accused the commission on Thursday of “trying to distract from the dire situation in which the Biden administration has plunged our country.”
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