Some Trump White House documents that the National Archives handed over to the select House Committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot were torn up by Donald Trump and taped back together.
“Some of the Trump presidential records received by the National Archives and Records Administration included paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump,” the Archives told CNN.
“White House records management officials during the Trump Administration recovered and taped together some of the torn-up records,” the Archives said in a statement. “These were turned over to the National Archives at the end of the Trump Administration, along with a number of torn-up records that had not been reconstructed by the White House. The Presidential Records Act requires that all records created by presidents be turned over to the National Archives at the end of their administrations.”
Politico reported in 2018 that the Trump White House had aides whose job partly entailed using scotch tape to reconstruct records after Trump tore them up.
More than 700 pages of documents including White House call logs, visitor logs, drafts of speeches and handwritten notes of top advisers, were handed over to the committee. It is not clear how many pages had been torn up and put back together.
