On Monday, Axios released photos showing illegally shredded documents in both a White House toilet and on Air Force One during Donald Trump’s administration, adding credibility to the bombshell report by New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman that Donald Trump illegally flushed presidential records down the toilet, frequently clogging them.
As reported by Axios, “The revelation by Haberman, whose coverage as a New York Times White House correspondent was followed obsessively by Trump, adds a vivid new dimension to his lapses in preserving government documents.”
Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that, while in office, “Trump routinely tore up documents and after leaving office brought substantial written materials back to Mar-a-Lago.”
At the time, Trump slammed the report as “fake news,” Telling Fox News: “Yeah it’s fake news and she’s a fake writer, a very unhappy writer. She got a Pulitzer Prize for Russia, Russia, Russia, and then they found out it was a hoax. And so did others.”
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Reacting to a report from Axios, CNN’s Dana Bash said the former president could face further legal scrutiny over the new photos that back up Haberman’s bombshell report.
“It’s not legal,” she said. “I mean, there is a law that is in place since the era post-Nixon that you have to preserve presidential records — that is the people who work in the White House and the man who was elected to the White House. And that is the rule. Which is why you have seen reporting from Maggie and others, the then-president had a habit of ripping things up and throwing them in the trash.”
“This looks nefarious,” she added. “We don’t know the specifics. I don’t know if we’re going to get to the bottom of what exactly was in there, because you’re going to have to have the former president cop to it. There’s no indication that is something he would do.”
Watch Trump’s reaction to the report and CNN’s Dana Bash commentary below:
Bash said the photos provided compelling evidence that they were authentic White House documents. “It’s a sharpie and it looks like Donald Trump’s handwriting,” she said of the torn-up documents photographed in the toilet.
