Photos show handwritten notes that Trump apparently tore up and tried to flush the toilet

Newly revealed photographs reveal two occasions in which former US President Donald Trump apparently flushed documents down the toilet.

New York Times reporter and CNN contributor Maggie Haberman publishes the new images in her upcoming book, « Confidence Man, » and the images were previously published by Axios. CNN previously reported how Trump flouted presidential record-keeping laws and often tore up documents, drafts and memos after reading them.

He periodically flushed papers down the toilet in the White House residence – only to be discovered later when repairmen were called in to fix the clogged toilet. Trump has denied the allegations, and in a statement given to Axios on Monday, a spokesperson claimed the information about the practice was fabricated.

In the footage revealed on Monday, it’s unclear what the documents refer to – and who drafted them – but they appear to be written in Trump’s handwriting in black marker. Haberman said one image was from a White House restroom and the other was from an overseas trip provided to him by a Trump White House source.

« Who knows what that paper was? Only he would know and probably whoever was dealing with it, but the important point is the tapes, » Haberman told CNN’s John Berman and Brianna Keilar on Monday’s « New Day. » morning.

Trump had a habit of disregarding normal record keeping procedures. On one occasion, Trump asked if anyone wanted to put up a copy of a speech he had just auctioned off on eBay, during a mid-flight tour of the Air Force One press cabin.

In other cases, Trump was tasking aides with carrying boxes of unread memos, articles and tweet drafts aboard the presidential plane for him to examine and then rip them to shreds.

A former senior Trump administration official said an assistant in the personnel secretary’s office typically comes to pick up items from the trash and remove them from Trump’s desk after leaving a room.

A former White House official recalled that while document retention was a key responsibility of the personnel secretary, the rest of Trump’s senior staff lacked a sense of their obligation to keep records of the papers that passed through the office. west wing.

Trump’s haphazard record keeping was the subject of a drawn-out fight earlier this year between him and the National Archives, and the Justice Department investigated the matter.