Though it isn’t set for release until October, a blockbuster new book about Donald Trump’s Presidency has already yielded some interesting allegations about Trump’s four years in the White House and what protocols he may have broken regarding document preservation.
In a snippet of Confidence Man, written by New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, it is alleged that Trump, or someone acting on his behest, would clog the toilets at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with torn up bits of paper. The early glimpse at the book was obtained first by Axios.
“I learned that staff in the White House residence would periodically find the toilet clogged...what the engineer would find would be wads of clumped up, wet, printed paper,” Haberman told CNN on Thursday. ”This was either notes or some other piece of paper that they believe [Trump] had thrown down the toilet.”
Haberman has over a decade of tenure on the Trump beat. She started covering the former President in 2011, long before his election to the highest office in the land. And her upcoming tome has Trump “terrified,” according to a former staffer.
"I still talk to some folks in ‘Trumpworld,’ the ones who have not engaged in criminality," former White House communications aide Alyssa Farah told The View on Thursday. “The former president is terrified of Maggie Haberman's book. [The flushing of notes and documents] is the first big anecdote, but there is quite a bit more to come.”
Farah posited that some compromising material must have been on those wadded up toilet treasures.
“What would be on those documents that you would be like, ‘this has to go down the toilet?’” Farah asked. “It was wrong when Hillary Clinton destroyed classified federal documents and it’s absolutely wrong when Donald Trump does it. I’m just shocked he went a step further—not just bleaching it, but sticking it down the toilet, which is something else.”
“[Haberman's] covered him for decades,” Farah explained. “He's scared of that. He is mortified.”
A recent report in The Washington Post wrote that Trump is already under investigation by the Justice Department for possible violation of laws related to the destruction of official government documents.
Already, at least 15 boxes of documents had to be retrieved from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and reports have indicated that a number of documents that were turned over were damaged and torn up, needing to be taped back together to reveal their contents.
Trump addressed the retrieval of documents and the allegations in the upcoming Haberman book in a statement that reads:
“[The National Archives and Records Administration] openly and willingly engaged with President Trump for the transport of boxes that contained letters, records, newspapers, magazines, and various articles. The papers were given easily and without conflict and on a very friendly basis... in fact, it was viewed as routine and ‘no big deal.’
“Also, another fake story, that I flushed papers and documents down a White House toilet, is categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book.”
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