Records Ripping and Presidential Plumbing
Is anyone else wondering why Donald Trump is not in jail yet? The latest law he broke, just in the news, is the Presidential Records Act which requires that all written communications, classified and unclassified, related to official duties be preserved, and subsequently turned over to the National Archives upon a given administration’s end. Fifteen boxes were just fetched from No. 45’s lair at Mar-a-Lago. Evidently, Trump had been ripping and flushing records in defiance of the law throughout his four years in office.
Some of those recently-retrieved documents had been pulled out of waste baskets and taped back together by White House staffers who said their boss was relentless in destroying both what he didn’t like and what he couldn’t be bothered with. They frequently put items, required by law to be saved, in “burn bags” to be destroyed.
Now we find, from the presidential plumber (actually a book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman), that the toilet in the residence was frequently clogged by wads of “clumped up printed wet paper.”
And we thought the stoppages were from the prodigious poops of the KFC gorging inhabitant! Additional details in a Washington Post article from 2/5/22. I can’t wait to see what late night comedians Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers will do with this information.
However, this news isn’t that funny. The string of Trump’s law-breaking includes violations of the Hatch Act, attempts to coerce and threaten Georgia’s Secretary of State of to “find more votes,” the outgoing president’s campaign of lies about the 2020 election, and his fomentation of the January 6, 2021 insurrection. All are quite serious.
In December of 2017, I posted a blog titled “Why I support the Impeachment of Donald J. Trump.” That piece was written before he was actually impeached, twice. I did not include the tax and other financial fraud crimes of this grifter prior to his election which are still under ongoing investigation and which I HOPE COME TO FRUITION SOON.
You have to ask if any of us (or hey, if Barack Obama) had committed these crimes, it would have been ignored with a shrug of the shoulders. (“There is no mechanism for enforcing” as some officials said of the Presidential Records Act.) I can’t understand how so many in the country can just carry on as if this all is normal.
I’ll close by recommending John Nichols’ new book Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers in which this investigative reporter insists that not only the 45th president but many of his cabinet members, need to be held accountable for the damage they caused our country during the health catastrophe of the past two years.
If not, then they and their ilk will be free to continue more of the same.
I’ll add that since I posted this, “the National Archives and Records Administration has asked the Justice Department to examine Donald Trump’s handling of White House records, sparking discussions among federal law enforcement officials about whether they shouldinvestigate the former president for a possible crime” (from the Washington Post article by Matt Zapotosky and Jacqueline Alemany)