( Rebecca Blackwell / AP Photo )
Josh Dawsey, a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post, discusses new reporting questioning Donald Trump's adherence to the Presidential Records Act, which requires the preservation of written communications related to a president’s official duties, after the former president was found ripping up documents "both sensitive and mundane" during his time in office.
→‘He never stopped ripping things up’: Inside Trump’s relentless document destruction habits
[music]
Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone? Question, how much did taxpayers pay? Asked the head of the American Historical Association in a Washington Post story last week. How much did the American taxpayers pay to have a bunch of highly qualified archivists sit at a desk and tape things together? Why did he ask that question? Well, President Trump, for all his talk about Hillary Clinton's emails, routinely tore up documents during his time in the White House.
He would leave shreds of paper on his desk, in the Oval Office or in a trash bin or per another report, he would flush some down the toilet. He'd rip things up so much, the reporting goes, that aids would pick up piles of papers left behind and staffers from the office of Records Management would tape the documents back together. Were there crimes committed in this process? Were there coverups of anything January 6th planning related or anything else? Will there be any recourse?
With me now is Josh Dawsey, political investigations and enterprise reporter for the Washington Post. One of the authors of the story that asks that question detailing Trump's habitual ripping up of documents and one called 15 boxes: Inside the long, strange trip of Trump's classified records. Hey, Josh, welcome back to WNYC.
Josh Dawsey: Brian, it's been too long. Good to hear from you.
Brian Lehrer: Let's take your most recent article first. What are these 15 boxes?
Josh Dawsey: The 15 boxes, when former President Trump left the White House, instead of handing over his documents, records, gifts, various things that he had accrued throughout the presidency, he instead took a whole host of things to Mar-a-Lago with him. Then last summer, our staff from the National Archives that puts together a compendium of all the presidential records and has been doing that for decades was looking for some of these high profile documents.
His letters with Kim Jong-un, his letters with president Obama, various gifts that they knew he had received. They realized that he had taken a lot of things to Mar-a-Lago that he was not supposed to take. In January, about one year after he left the White House, they paid a contractor to go down and take these 15 boxes back. After a bit of a month's long standoff with the former president and his team, he finally agreed to give these 15 boxes of things back through the National Archives.
Brian Lehrer: You quote a trucking administrator at Bennett, a Georgia transportation firm that handles lots of government contracts, saying that, "Under traditional circumstances, shipment of these sorts of materials would be handled through a secure transfer." It remains unclear what protocols were followed because as one person familiar with the transfer said, "Nothing about this is normal."
In fact, as you report, officials have not identified what company handled the Mar-a-Lago shipment. Do we even know the chain of possession here and that these documents are secured and nothing was destroyed?
Josh Dawsey: Well, we know that the National Archives now has the documents in a secure facility known as a SCIF colloquially. We know that former President Trump's lawyers say that they're still looking for other documents, but brings a bit of an honor system. The former president, they demanded certain things, they asked for certain things and he's given some of them back, but he was responsible for packing up the boxes and making sure they were returned to the National Archives.
Now, the wrinkle here is that based on our reporting, the archives has not fully gone through all the boxes because when they began looking through them to see what was here, they realized that they were classified material, some of it marked Top Secret or even above Top Secret.
They did not want what is known a spillage, where people who do not have the clearance to see such materials see them. They've left these boxes for now. They've fully gone through the and are waiting for guidance from DOJ or other officials at the Archives.
Brian Lehrer: Do you know what kinds of classified documents Trump took home Mar-a-Lago?
Josh Dawsey: Well, we don't, Brian, and that's one of the lingering questions we still have. We've been trying to discern exactly what was in these boxes for about 10 days now and hopefully, we will figure out more soon.
Brian Lehrer: Is there suspicion of destruction of documents pertaining to the January 6th investigation or of anything else?
Josh Dawsey: The suspicion that the former president was quite careless and destructive of documents in a host of ways. One, as you said in your [inaudible 00:05:29] , was a prolific ripper and shredder, would often leave documents in piles on the floor, in the study, in his residents, and there was an elaborate system put in place [unintelligible 00:05:42] try to piece them back together.
The National Archives says that a lot of the documents that they received were taped back together, but a lot of them were not or some of them were not, and some of the documents that went to the January 6th committee were clearly taped back together.
The White House was known for using burn bags for lots of documents. We talked to various officials in our reporting who said they frequently burned things. Then Maggie Haberman, a long time and very talented and respected reporter of the New York Times recently reported that the former president was also flushing documents down the toilet. We know there was prolific ripping and shredding, there was some burning and apparently, there was also flushing.
Brian Lehrer: I didn't get to read that story in detail. Does Maggie report what documents were flushed or what anybody says the documents were that might have been flushed because that's so reeks of trying to destroy evidence, but we don't know if it was that?
Josh Dawsey: We don't. Maggie reported that both on foreign trips and in the White House that staff would find paper in the toilet. I don't think they were able to discern again what the paper was, but it was clearly paper that had been flushed according to her reporting.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any questions for Washington Post investigative reporter Josh Dawsey on how President Donald Trump handle then I guess is still handling official documents, including classified ones. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet a question @BrianLehrer.
You write Trump had a ripping process so distinctive that several aides instantly recalled that two large clean tears that left paper in quarters and the remnants were strewn on desks, in trash cans, and on floors from the Oval Office to Air Force One. What was that about?
Josh Dawsey: The ripping was somewhat indiscriminate according to folks who worked in the White House with him. He would often have these large boxes of paper, they would be newspaper clippings, briefings of various subject matter, letters that folks wanted them to look at, printed out TV [inaudible 00:08:17] , all sorts of documents. He would frequently just rip them up when he was done with them. Usually, the place where he did this the most often was his private dining room off the Oval Office.
There's a private dining room where there's a TV and he would keep these large boxes of paper in. When he would review them, he would often rip them up. The various officials, two different former chiefs of staff, his chief counsel, Don McGahn, at one time warned him about the continual ripping and the Records Act and that they had to put all of these things back together.
That anything that he wrote on or saw or reviewed or anything that was in on the resolute test or in his possession was an official government record or most of them were official government records, and he was unwilling to change his pattern of behavior. There were lots and lots and lots of ripped documents. Archives' officials say that-- and every time a former president leaves office, they have some things that they take that they later go to the Archives, so they have to go get them.
They have some documents that are not [inaudible 00:09:29] , but my colleagues and I talked to a lot of folks involved in this process over the years and they said, "We've never had anything like this."
That this was a different scope, there were more documents that were damaged and destroyed, there were more things that were taken, [inaudible 00:09:43] official public record and there's an unprecedented challenge in putting together the historical record of his presidency because of these various practices of former President Trump.
Brian Lehrer: Inside the White House, as far as your reporting indicates, how did others in the Trump administration respond to the former president's relentless ripping and tearing? Was Trump warned about shredding documents?
Josh Dawsey: He was. As I said, there were two of his former chiefs of staff and one of his former chief counsels who warned him about the Records Act. Realizing that he was not going to change his behavior, they instead put together a system of trying to put the papers back together. Folks from the Staff Secretary's office, the office of Records Management, various folks from the chiefs of staff office would look through the materials he had ripped up and tried to reassemble them at least in some cases.
Brian Lehrer: Is the idea here that all documents in the White House sensitive or not belong in the historical record?
Josh Dawsey: Basically, all of them, yes. Basically anything that the president reviewed, was briefed on, looked at, wrote on, had in his possession, go to the historical record. Presidential historians say that having this exhaustive compendium of everything a president does, [inaudible 00:11:14] , you're able to see how they make decisions, assess how they make policies, really have a deeper and better understanding of what the presidency was about.
I talked to Julian Zelizer, he's a presidential historian at Princeton, and he said to me the reason they keep everything is because you don't really know when something is going to become important when there's a issue or topic or somehow they're trying to understand a particular thing that it's important to have all of these deliberative documents.
Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call, Kevin in Hopatcong, you're on WNYC with Josh Josh Dawsey from the Washington Post.
Kevin: Hi, I'm wondering, do we need to write a law because it seems that there are things that we just take for granted that a president won't do? Maybe this is one where there should be a law. No, you can't flush stuff down the toilet. Thank you.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. I guess there's no law against ripping up your own papers and flushing them down your toilet unless there's a law protecting those papers.
Josh Dawsey: Well, the Presidential Records Act is a wall and it says that these official government documents cannot be destroyed or treated this way. The problem according to experts and lawyers from different administrations that it's toothless. There's not much of an enforcement mechanism of the law. In some ways, it was similar, Brian, to the Hatch Act where you're not able as a federal government employee to go out and make political statements.
There's several former Trump heads, Stephanie Grisham, his former press secretary, said to me that President Trump told her, "Say whatever you want. I'm the person who decides to take this punishment for the Hatch Act. You're fine." Some of these laws are good faith laws, the Hatch Act, the Presidential Records Act and enforcing them is harder than it seems. It's more of an honor system.
Brian Lehrer: I guess it's different if there's some destruction of evidence going on that's incriminating or if the records are more routine and we don't know that yet. You're right that one of Trump's first chiefs of staff, Reince Priebus, urged aides not to put crazy, his word, documents on the president's desk. Any idea what kinds of things Reince Priebus might have been referring to specifically as crazy documents not to show Trump?
Josh Dawsey: Well, there would be lots of stories from conspiracy minded websites like Brietbart or the Gateway Pundit or various briefings from outside folks who believed in the deep state and that there is cabal of folks inside the government trying to take former President Trump down and they would try to get these briefings to him.
There were lots-- in the early days of the White House, I'm not saying it ever got entirely but there were lots of folks who wanted to get conspiracy theories to former President Trump, wanting to get him to [inaudible 00:14:17] that were quite not based in reality.
Reince Priebus said to folks at one point, he sat them down and said, "You can't just walk in the Oval Office and put these things on the former president's desk." A, he will believe them to be true and B, he will rip them up and we have to put them together and they'll have to be stored as part of the Presidential Records Act. It was quite a problem early on because there were so many people who had access to the Oval Office and they were just putting frankly for lack of a better word nonsense on his desk.
Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Mark in Norwalk, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mark.
Mark: Hello. I've got a question. Why don't reporters ask Republican leadership how they would feel if Biden or a Democratic president did what Trump did? I think we have to keep putting their feet to the fire about this stuff.
Brian Lehrer: Good question. Josh, have you or has anybody that you know of raised that with Republican leadership that shrugs this off? Do they say do you ask, "If Joe Biden did the exact same thing, would you care?"
Josh Dawsey: Well, we certainly know that Republicans were quite concerned about Hillary Clinton and her email server. There was a years long story and there seemed to be lots of concern over records management. Here, the responses so far have been fairly muted. Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, has not shown any palpable concern over this nor has a Mitch McConnell so it is a very good question.
We certainly know that in the past, a lot of the Republican lawmakers were quite concerned about proper records management at least when [inaudible 00:16:14].
Brian Lehrer: On Hillary Clinton, I know you haven't written about this in the Washington Post, but have you looked into this new reporting that I think originated on Fox on Friday that says and I'm looking at the Wall Street Journal version right now or from an opinion piece in the Journal.
Lawyers for the Clinton campaign, according to Fox News, paid a technology company to "infiltrate servers" belonging to Trump Tower and later the White House in order to establish a "inference" and "narrative" to bring government agencies linking Donald Trump to Russia, a filing-- sorry, to link Trump to Russia basically. This reporting sites a filing of special counsel John Durham as the source. Durham looking into what was happening in those last days of the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign.
Josh Dawsey: I admit that we have not done reporting on that yet, Brian, so I want to be careful on what I said because I don't think I'm a subject matter expert on that. I know folks at the Post are looking into this and there's reporting effort around understanding the filing and the significance but I don't think it would be smart for me to say much about that because I don't know a lot about that.
Brian Lehrer: Fair enough. Catherine in Scarsdale, you're on WNYC. Hi, Catherine.
Catherine: Brian, thank you. Just a side point. Mr. Hawley missed the point of the prior questioner's question, which is not what we know, but what reporters are asking Republicans and making Republicans say out loud. My question is; do we have any reason to think-- Mr. Hawley said that there was and I believe he said several months long delay--
Brian Lehrer: Just to be clear Josh Hawley is the Republican Senator from Missouri. My guest is Washington Post correspondent Josh Dawsey, so Catherine--
Catherine: Sorry. May I beg your pardon Mr. Dawsey. Anyway, do we have any reason given, as Mr. Josh Dawsey said, that there was a several months delay between the contractor from the National Archives being contracted with and the contractor being able to obtain those boxes from Mar-a-Lago and return them to the National Archives. Do you have any reason to think that those months were not used by Trump or his closest colleagues to remove things from those boxes that would be difficult for Trump to have the public know.
Josh Dawsey: Catherine, frankly, we don't know exactly how those months were used. We know that National Archives went to former President Trump in the summer and asked for a lot of these documents back and he initially refused or declined. The process went on for several months, eventually to the point the national archive said if you don't give us back some of these documents and items we are going to notify the Department of Justice and Congress [inaudible 00:19:36].
That's what eventually precipitated some of the items to be returned. I'm not exactly sure what happened in those few months. We've been looking into why that delay took so long, but eventually, with a proverbial Damocles' sword, they gave over some of these documents back.
Brian Lehrer: Catherine, thank you for your call. I guess of most interest to the most people would be that some White House records handed over to the January 6th committee had been ripped up and taped back together. Has Trump's destruction of documents complicated that inquiry or others that are serious into the previous administration?
Josh Dawsey: Well, as far as the January 6th committee goes, they haven't gotten most of the documents yet. The National Archives are still processing and they're pretty in a preliminary stage of what the committee is going to get, so we don't really know on that. We know they've gotten the first [inaudible 00:20:38] of documents and some of those documents were ripped up and had to be reassembled.
There's still a rolling continual process of document preservation that goes to the January 6th committee. We're pretty early in that phase.
Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Josh, before you go, I wonder if you talk about-- and I said your most recent article was the one about 15 boxes of these papers that some of which are classified that Trump is finally returning from Mar-a-Lago. Now, I'm just looking at your file now and I see you have even a more recent story that just dropped this morning with the headline, A weakened Trump? As some voters edge away, he battles parts of the Republican Party he once ran.
Here we are in the 2022 election cycle, of course, it's Congress this year, it's not the presidential election, but both parties have their divisions. You have the progressive wing and the sort of Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema mini wing both dissenting from what may be the majority of Democrats in Washington who were in Congress. With the Republicans, we, of course, had Mike Pence coming out the other day and saying Trump was wrong about January 6th and asking Pence to overturn the election and some other aspects of it.
McConnell too. What's the gist of your article regarding Trump battling parts of the Republican party?
Josh Dawsey: Former President Trump has been increasingly hostile towards Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, a number of senators, Susan Collins, and others in recent months. What's happening, Brian, is that his numbers have slipped among Republican voters. He's still the most popular person in the party, but the number of folks who want him to be the nominee in 2024 have gone down. The approval numbers among the Republicans have gone down some.
His advisors have repeatedly encouraged him, or at least some of them have, to stop talking about the falsehood that he won the election, to drop the 2020 and all of the different conspiracy claims, the false conspiracy claims about the election, move on to attacking Biden, and charting a course for the future, and he's not willing to do that. He's seen some elements of the [inaudible 00:23:23] moving away from him.
One of the other frustrations among a lot of the Republicans I talk to is that he's raised $122 million. He has more than the Republican committee. He has more than the Democrats, and he has more than the senatorial committees. He's raised a lot of it on the lie that the election was stolen, but he's not spending that money to help any Republicans. He's just stockpiling it away.
A lot of folks say he's raising money from all these Republican donors [inaudible 00:23:52] and others from the party and he's just keeping it for his own war chest. The number of signs that show-- I don't want to overstate conclusions. We're not saying that he no longer is the most influential kingmaker in the party. He remains that way, but there was a sense that he had unshakable grip on the Republican party and that's changing a bit.
You see it in the polling data, you see it in conversations with donors, you see it in conversation with the party leadership. His grip on the party is not as strong as it was [inaudible 00:24:30].
Brian Lehrer: There we leave it for today with Josh Dawsey, political investigations and enterprise reporter from the Washington Post, and one of the authors of the story detailing Trump's habitual ripping up of documents. Josh, thanks so much.
Josh Dawsey: Thanks for having me, Brian.
Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.