Trump has a habit of ripping up all of his paper — his own "filing system" of sorts. Officials working in records management spend their days taping them back together to avoid violating Presidential Records Act https://t.co/SxhurtBzmC
— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) June 10, 2018
This means that when historians write about this presidency, they'll have a constant reminder of his childishness in the evidence they use and, as a result, in the accounts they write. https://t.co/wTS3xuu6cH
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) June 10, 2018
And the WH staff is under instruction not to let him have matches, or he’d set fire to the drapes…
Solomon Lartey spent the first five months of the Trump administration working in the Old Executive Office Building, standing over a desk with scraps of paper spread out in front of him.
Lartey, who earned an annual salary of $65,969 as a records management analyst, was a career government official with close to 30 years under his belt. But he had never seen anything like this in any previous administration he had worked for. He had never had to tape the president’s papers back together again.
Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, Lartey and his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, he said, “like a jigsaw puzzle.” Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.
It was a painstaking process that was the result of a clash between legal requirements to preserve White House records and President Donald Trump’s odd and enduring habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them — what some people described as his unofficial “filing system.”
Under the Presidential Records Act, the White House must preserve all memos, letters, emails and papers that the president touches, sending them to the National Archives for safekeeping as historical records.
But White House aides realized early on that they were unable to stop Trump from ripping up paper after he was done with it and throwing it in the trash or on the floor, according to people familiar with the practice. Instead, they chose to clean it up for him, in order to make sure that the president wasn’t violating the law…
Lartey, 54, and Young, 48, were career government officials who worked together in records management until this spring, when both were abruptly terminated from their jobs. Both are now unemployed and still full of questions about why they were stripped of their badges with no explanation and marched off of the White House grounds by Secret Service…
(Incidentally, while I am not a medical professional, a nurse friend referred to puffy, flushed, water-retaining old-man mitts like those in the photo as “heart patient hands”.)
Giving this a cutesy frame like “his own filing system” is like focusing on the clever way a shoplifter saves on his grocery bill.
— Schooley (@Rschooley) June 10, 2018
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