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As president, Donald Trump had a reputation for having a hard time briefing and destroying meeting notes.
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Sometimes he asked officials if he could keep the received documents, according to his staff.
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“From time to time, the president would say, ‘Can I keep this?'” the former Trump chief of staff told CNN.
During his presidency, Donald Trump developed a reputation for being difficult to brief and may have destroyed meeting notes by flushing them down the toilet, but he would ask officials to keep the documents received, members of his staff said.
Trump’s reluctance to attend the presidential daily briefing while in office was well documented. His first briefer, Ted Gistaro, told CBS News that the former president “doesn’t really read anything,” while intelligence officers described him as “by far the hardest” new president to brief. The daily briefing was delivered to Vice President Mike Pence more often than to the President, The Guardian reported.
Hoping to encourage the president to read more of his briefings, Gistaro’s successor, Beth Sanner, included a one-page outline and series of images, former CIA officer John Helgerson told his book “Getting to Know the President.” .
When he did attend meetings, former President Trump reportedly destroyed records, including by flushing written notes down the White House toilets. He also had a habit of tearing and shredding documents, The Washington Post reported. The shredding was so fruitful, Politico reported, that an entire team devoted themselves to stitching documents back together for safekeeping.
“I’ve seen Trump tear up papers, not into little, little pieces, but usually twice — so take a piece of paper, tear it once, tear it again, and then throw it in the trash,” The Washington Post reported. . That’s what Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, said.
In addition to his habit of destroying meeting notes, several staff members noted that Trump would ask officials if he could keep the documents received.
“From time to time, the president would say, ‘Can I keep this?'” former Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Friday. Mulvaney added that the White House had “whole teams” of people dedicated to preserving official records.
While Mulvaney wouldn’t draw a direct line between Trump’s habit of asking for records and searching his Mar-a-Lago residence for classified documents, his comments matched those of John Bolton, Trump’s one-time national security adviser.
“Often the president would say: [to intelligence briefers] ‘Well, can I keep this?'” Bolton told CBS News. “And in my experience, the intelligence officers usually said, ‘Well, sir, we’d rather take that back,’ but sometimes they forgot.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
