US house to investigate whether Trump broke law in handling of documents - The Guardian
Panel asks National Archives to turn over communications about missing and destroyed records relevant to Capitol attack
The House oversight committee on Thursday opened an investigation into potential violations of the Presidential Records Act by Donald Trump, after he retained and destroyed records relevant to the 6 January insurrection.
The panel asked the National Archives to turn over communications between the former president and the agency about missing and destroyed records, as well as a description of materials in boxes of records retrieved from Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago last month.
According to the New York Times, the boxes contained what the National Archives and Records Administration believed was classified information in some documents.
Staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet – which they believed Trump had flushed, according to journalist Maggie Haberman in her forthcoming book Confidence Man.
“Removing or concealing government records is a criminal offense,” Carolyn Maloney, the chairwoman of the powerful oversight committee, said in a letter to the National Archives. “Trump and his senior advisers must also be held accountable for any violations of the law.”
The National Archives recently discovered that the former president had retained at least 15 boxes of materials at Mar-a-Lago. Among the items that travelled with Trump to his post-presidency home in Florida were “love letters” from Kim Jong-un, a letter left for him by Barack Obama, and a model of Air Force One with the red-white-blue livery he chose for it.
In a statement, Trump said: “Following collaborative and respectful discussions, the National Archives and Records Administration (Nara) arranged for the transport of boxes that contained presidential records in compliance with the Presidential Records Act” from Mar-a-Lago that will one day become part of the Donald J Trump presidential library.
The media’s “characterisation of my relationship with Nara is fake news. It was exactly the opposite. It was a great honour to work with Nara to help formally preserve the Trump legacy,” said Trump, who is yet to comment on Haberman’s toilet revelations.
Trump arranged their return, the National Archives said, but as part of that process, they also discovered that Trump had torn up some documents, while other records about Trump’s efforts to pressure Mike Pence, the former vice-president, to overturn the election were missing.
The National Archives also found that Trump had taken classified documents to Mar-a-lago, and asked the justice department to examine whether they should open a criminal investigation into the former president. Justice officials then instructed the National Archives to have the documents examined by the inspector general, who in turn is required to alert the DoJ if classified information is found outside authorized areas.
The agency had been seeking to fulfill document requests from a separate House select committee that is investigating the Capitol attack.
It was not immediately clear whether the justice department would move ahead with the referral to open a criminal investigation, which was first reported by the Washington Post. But the House oversight committee’s investigation is expected to run regardless of whether prosecutors consider charging Trump.
“Republicans in Congress obsessively investigated former ecretary of State Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server,” Maloney wrote. “Trump’s conduct, in contrast, involves a former president potentially violating a criminal law by intentionally removing records.”
Part of the difficulty in opening a criminal investigation for violations of the Presidential Records Act – which mandates the preservation of White House documents – is that the statute lacks clear enforcement guidelines, and every administration has some violations.
The presidential records act makes it a crime to destroy or fail to turn over White House records to the Archives. There are several ways a document becomes a White House record, but it is automatic for documents seen by a president.
However, it also requires that the person violating the statute does so knowingly. Trump had been told by White House counsel that tearing up records he reviewed was a violation, but he also did so as part of a longstanding habit, according to a former Trump aide.
The chaotic nature of the Trump administration’s final days may also prove an issue: there was no formal White House staff secretary appointed to monitor and file documents reviewed by Trump after the departure of former staff secretary Derek Lyons on 18 December 2020.
The White House staff secretary’s office is partly responsible for retaining sensitive and presidential documents, but after Lyons’s departure, and with nothing more than a skeleton staff employed, some documents may not have been properly stored, the Trump aide said.
Trump also departed the White House hours before Joe Biden’s inauguration with a number of “boxes” containing personal and official materials – another habit he developed over the course of his presidency whenever he travelled, the Trump aide said.
The boxes contained anything from newspaper clippings of quotes he liked, which he would sign and have them mailed to the person in question, to printed-out drafts of tweets, to sensitive presidential briefing documents, the Trump aide said.
When Trump got bored on long-haul flights on Air Force One – as he often did, the Trump aide said – he would dip into his boxes. After reviewing documents, he would regularly tear them up and drop the pieces to the floor, or in other cases, stuff them into his jacket pocket.
The boxes that followed Trump around became something of a running joke among West Wing staffers who would comment on “the boss and his boxes”, the Trump aide said. It also became a source for consternation for aides having to pick up torn pieces to tape them together.
But the nature of Trump’s indifference to the Presidential Records Act, despite repeated warnings that his behaviour amounted to violations, meant that a number of items and records were removed from the White House and taken to Mar-a-Lago.
The issue of presidential records, the Trump administration and the National Archives has been central to the investigation by the House committee investigating the insurrection on 6 January that sought to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. Trump tried to withhold White House documents in a dispute that rose to the supreme court.
In an 8-1 ruling last month, the court let stand a lower court ruling that said the Archives could turn over documents, which include presidential diaries, visitor logs, speech drafts and handwritten notes dealing with 6 January from the files of the former chief of staff Mark Meadows. At the time, the House committee agreed to defer its attempt to retrieve some documents, at the request of the Biden administration.
A referral for potential criminal prosecution from a federal agency or from Congress does not mean the justice department is likely to bring charges or that it will even investigate the matter.
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source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/10/national-archives-asks-for-doj-investigation-into-trump-document-handling
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