Trump, in contrast, does not have those preservationist instincts. “All of the campaign material didn’t need to come into the White House or go to Archives.” “I remember the day he sent down to me his race speech from the campaign, handwritten,” she said. It was a really structured process.”īrown said Obama had an eye on preserving documents for history - even ones he was not technically required to send to the National Archives. Documents would go out to the president and then come back to the staff secretary’s office in the same folder for distribution and handling.
She said all paper that was going to the president “would go in a folder with labels - one color for decision memos, for example, and another one for letters. “I never remember the president throwing any official paper away.”īrown described a regimented process for dealing with presidential records. “All of the official paper that went into, came back out again, to the best of my knowledge,” said Lisa Brown, who served as President Barack Obama’s first staff secretary. Lartey and Young described a system that stands in stark contrast to how records management was conducted under the Obama administration, which ran a structured paperwork process. According to Young and Lartey, staffers in the records department were still designated to the task of taping together the scraps as recently as this spring.
The White House did not comment on the president’s paper-ripping habit. It felt like the lowest form of work you can take on without having to empty the trash cans.” “I’m looking at my director, and saying, ‘Are you guys serious?’ We’re making more than $60,000 a year, we need to be doing far more important things than this. “We had to endure this under the Trump administration,” Young said. One of his colleagues, Reginald Young Jr., who worked as a senior records management analyst, said that during over two decades of government service, he had never been asked to do such a thing. He said his entire department was dedicated to the task of taping paper back together in the opening months of the Trump administration. “I had a letter from Schumer - he tore it up,” he said.
Lartey said the papers he received included newspaper clips on which Trump had scribbled notes, or circled words invitations and letters from constituents or lawmakers on the Hill, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “You found pieces and taped them back together and then you gave it back to the supervisor.” The restored papers would then be sent to the National Archives to be properly filed away. “We got Scotch tape, the clear kind,” Lartey recalled in an interview. Staffers had the fragments of paper collected from the Oval Office as well as the private residence and send it over to records management across the street from the White House for Lartey and his colleagues to reassemble. Instead, they chose to clean it up for him, in order to make sure that the president wasn’t violating the law. 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.īut 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. 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.” 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.