New "Toiletgate"?
Trump probably flushed documents down the toilet
Created: 2022-08-09 21:54
By: Bettina Menzel
Protests against former US President Donald Trump in London in 2019.
In the depiction, the politician sits on a golden toilet and tweets.
© El Universal / ZUMA Press / Imago
Donald Trump is said to have torn up files and flushed them down the White House toilet during his presidency.
The ex-president denies that - but now there are photos.
Mar-a-Lago - Early Monday morning, the FBI searched former US President Donald Trump's luxury home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
Such a raid is unprecedented in US history and requires approval from the highest level of the Department of Justice.
Federal police officers were apparently looking for important documents from Trump's tenure.
On Monday, the focus then also came to the toilet in the White House - this is unusual even by American standards.
Trump apparently flushed confidential documents down the toilet - and why that's important
In recent months, it has come to light that Trump apparently tore up documents during his presidency and disposed of them in the garbage or flushed them down the toilet.
This is the result of research by the
New York Times
journalist Maggie Haberman for her book "Confidence Man".
However, under the Presidential Records Act, all documents created by or sent to a US President must be preserved.
Destroying records may therefore be illegal.
It had already become known in February that the toilet in the West Wing had been clogged several times, which former employees of the President attributed to Trump's special way of "destroying documents".
Now Haberman apparently received photos that are supposed to document this.
The journalist shared the pictures on Twitter on Monday.
The scraps of paper would show Trump's handwriting, according to Haberman.
“Trump's habit of tearing up paper notes that had to be taped back together was well known;
his habit of throwing them away doesn't," the
NYT
writer added in another comment on the post.
Toiletgate: Trump had to flush 10 to 15 times
After the allegations first became known in February, Trump said it was "categorically untrue" that he flushed files down the toilet.
Haberman invented the story to promote her "largely fictitious book," the ex-president continued at the time.
Author Maggie Haberman was the
NYT
White House correspondent during Trump's tenure, and the president is said to have followed her reporting obsessively at the time.
Donald Trump: A big scandal - as a series in pictures
View photo gallery
Trump himself had publicly raged about the flushing of the toilets in the White House during his tenure.
The US President complained at the time that it had to be pressed ten to 15 times.
The omissions became known under the hashtag #Toiletgate, which should now have a new dimension.
It is unclear whether the alleged destruction of the documents and the frequent flushing are related.
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New "toiletgate" is not Trump's only problem
In addition to allegations of flushing confidential documents down the toilet, the former US President is said to have taken important files with him to his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Among them was apparently classified material as well as what Trump called a "love letter" from North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and a letter from Barack Obama.
The National Archives had to pick up 15 boxes of files at Trump's Florida headquarters in February this year.
However, the recent FBI raids are not Trump's only problem.
At the public hearings of the investigative committee into the Capitol attack, witnesses heavily incriminated the former president.
Accordingly, Trump knew that the demonstrators were armed on January 6, 2021 and deliberately sent them to the Capitol.
Recently, there had been growing evidence that the Justice Department was investigating Trump's behavior more closely.
The question is whether Attorney General Merrick Garland could take criminal action against Trump.
In addition, a Georgia prosecutor is currently investigating Trump's efforts to overturn the outcome of the presidential election.
The former reality TV star, meanwhile, has publicly flirted with running again as a presidential candidate in the 2024 election.
With a view to Trump's possible political comeback, the
New York Times
raised the question of whether he could be banned from public office - and thus also from the presidency - if he were to be accused of taking files and documents from the White House against the current US - violated the law
(dpa/bme).
