Will Trump Burn the Evidence? – The New Yorker

Donald Trump is not much of a note-taker, and he does not like his staff to take notes. He has a habit of tearing up documents at the close of meetings. (Records analysts, armed with Scotch Tape, have tried to put the pieces back together.) No real record exists for five meetings Trump had with Vladimir Putin during the first two years of his Presidency. Members of his staff have routinely used apps that automatically erase text messages, and Trump often deletes his own tweets, notwithstanding a warning from the National Archives and Records Administration that doing so contravenes the Presidential Records Act.

Trump cannot abide documentation for fear of disclosure, and cannot abide disclosure for fear of disparagement. For decades, in private life, he required people who worked with him, and with the Trump Organization, to sign nondisclosure agreements, pledging never to say a bad word about him, his family, or his businesses. He also extracted nondisclosure agreements from women with whom he had or is alleged to have had sex, including both of his ex-wives. In 2015 and 2016, he required these contracts from people involved in his campaign, including a distributor of his Make America Great Again hats. (Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign required N.D.A.s from some employees, too. In 2020, Joe Biden called on Michael Bloomberg to release his former employees from such agreements.) In 2017, Trump, unable to distinguish between private life and public service, carried his practice of requiring nondisclosure agreements into the Presidency, demanding that senior White House staff sign N.D.A.s. According to the Washington Post, at least one of them, in draft form, included this language: I understand that the United States Government or, upon completion of the term(s) of Mr. DonaldJ.Trump, an authorized representative of Mr. Trump, may seek any remedy available to enforce this Agreement including, but not limited to, application for a court order prohibiting disclosure of information in breach of this Agreement. Aides warned him that, for White House employees, such agreements are likely not legally enforceable. The White House counsel, Don McGahn, refused to distribute them; eventually, he relented, and the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, pressured employees to sign them.

Those N.D.A.s havent stopped a small villages worth of ex-Trump Cabinet members and staffers from blabbing about him, much to the Presidents dismay. When people are chosen by a man to go into government at high levels and then they leave government and they write a book about a man and say a lot of things that were really guarded and personal, I dont like that, he told the Washington Post. In 2019, he tweeted, I am currently suing various people for violating their confidentiality agreements. Last year, a former campaign worker filed a class-action lawsuit that, if successful, would render void all campaign N.D.A.s. Trump has only stepped up the fight. Earlier suits were filed by Trump personally, or by his campaign, but, last month, the Department of Justice filed suit against Stephanie Winston Wolkoff for publishing a book, Melania and Me, about her time volunteering for the First Lady, arguing, astonishingly, that Wolkoffs N.D.A. is a contract with the United States and therefore enforceable by the United States. (Unlike the suit against Trumps former national-security adviser John Bolton, relating to the publication of his book, The Room Where It Happened, there is no claim that anything in Wolkoffs book is or was ever classified.) And Trump hasnt stopped: last year, he required doctors and staff who treated him at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to sign N.D.A.s.

Hardly a day passes that Trump does not attempt to suppress evidence, as if all the world were in violation of an N.D.A. never to speak ill of him. He has sought to discredit publications and broadcasts that question him, investigations that expose him, crowds that protest him, polls that fail to favor him, and, down to the bitter end, ballots cast against him. None of this bodes well for the historical record and for the scheduled transfer of materials from the White House to the National Archives, on January 20, 2021. That morning, even as President-elect JosephR.Biden, Jr., is ascending the steps of the Capitol, staffers from the archives will presumably be in the White House, unlocking doors, opening desks, packing boxes, and removing hard drives. What might be missing, that day, from file drawers and computer servers at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is difficult to say. But records that were never kept, were later destroyed, or are being destroyed right now chronicle the day-to-day doings of one of the most consequential Presidencies in American history and might well include evidence of crimes, violations of the Constitution, and human-rights abuses. It took a very long time to establish rules governing the fate of Presidential records. Trump does not mind breaking rules and, in the course of a long life, has regularly done so with impunity. The Presidential Records Act isnt easily enforceable. The Trump Presidency nearly destroyed the United States. Will what went on in the darker corners of his White House ever be known?

The truth behind a Presidents actions can be found only in his official papers, HarryS.Truman said in 1949, and every Presidential paper is official. Truman became an advocate of archival preservation after learning about the fate of his predecessors papers. When George Washington left office, in 1797, he brought his papers back to Mount Vernon, but, loaned out, they were extensively mutilated by rats and otherwise injured by damp; eventually, they were carried by the historian Jared Sparks to Massachusetts, where Sparks threw out anything he didnt like, scrapped what he found worthless, gave away much of the rest, and, beginning in 1837, published what he liked best as The Writings of George Washington.

For many years, there was no alternative for a departing President but to take his papers home with him; there wasnt really any place to put them. Thomas Jefferson, having no confidence that the office of the private secretary of the President of the U.S. will ever be a regular and safe deposit for public papers, took pains to deposit many of his papers with his Cabinet departments. In 1810, Congress established a Committee on Ancient Public Records and Archives of the United States. It reported that the records of the federal government were in a state of great disorder and exposure; and in a situation neither safe nor convenient nor honorable to the nation. Congress took little action. In 1814, the congressional library burned to the ground.

Most of the papers of William Henry Harrison, the log-cabin candidate, succumbed to flames when that log cabin burned down. Those of both John Tyler and Zachary Taylor were largely destroyed during the Civil War. In 1853, when Millard Fillmore left the White House, he had his papers shipped to a mansion in Buffalo. He died in 1874, having made no provisions for the papers. When Fillmores only son died, in 1889, his will ordered his executors to burn or otherwise effectively destroy all correspondence or letters to or from my father. Only by the merest miracle were forty-four volumes of Fillmores Presidential-letter books found in an attic of a house, in 1908, and only because it was on the verge of being demolished.

Chester Arthurs son had most of his fathers Presidential papers burned in three garbage cans. The only place I ever found in my life to put a paper so as to find it again was either a side coat-pocket or the hands of a clerk, UlyssesS.Grant once said. For years after Grants Administration, scholars were able to locate hardly any of his Presidential papers. In 1888, Congress urged the Library of Congress to collect the papers of the Presidents. In the eighteen-nineties, the library established a Manuscript Division, and a historian who later became its chief began lobbying for the establishment of a National Archives; meanwhile, the American Historical Association formed a Public Archives Commission. In 1910, after the commission reported that many of the records of the Government have in the past been lost or destroyed, the A.H.A. petitioned Congress to build a depository. Congress authorized the funds, but no plan was undertaken until after the close of the First World War.

Grover Cleveland, during his two terms, preferred to communicate in person, leaving no paper trail. He insisted that the records of his Presidency were his personal property and, in 1886, refused to turn over papers that the Senate had demanded: if I saw fit to destroy them no one could complain. (That is what, during the Presidency of DwightD.Eisenhower, came to be called executive privilege.) Clevelands contention became a convention: the Presidents papers belong to the President, who can deny requests for disclosure not only from the public but from other branches of the federal government. William McKinley was assassinated in 1901; his secretary held on to his papers until 1935, when he donated them to the Library of Congress, where they remained under his, and later his sons, tight control until 1954. In 1924, a raft of papers from the Taft, Wilson, and Harding Administrations were found in the attic of the White House. Warren Hardings Presidency was riven by scandal; after his death, his wife told the chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress that she had destroyed all his papers, although she had burned only those she thought would harm his memory. Most of the rest she left to the Harding Memorial Association. The Library of Congress acquired a cache of those and other papers in 1972, on the condition that they be closed to the public until 2014. (They turned out to include a thousand pages of love letters between Harding and his mistress. Wont you please destroy? he wrote her in one letter. She did not destroy.) Calvin Coolidge instructed his private secretary to destroy all his personal files; on Coolidges death, the secretary said, There would have been nothing preserved if I had not taken some things out on my own responsibility.

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Will Trump Burn the Evidence? - The New Yorker