New Images Allegedly Support That Trump Would Flush Important Documents Down the Toilet as President
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Chip Somodevilla/Getty; William B. Plowman/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Donald Trump (left), Maggie Haberman
Reporter Maggie Haberman is doubling down on her previous claims that Donald Trump would flush important documents down the toilet while he was in office — showing photos that she says depict handwritten documents resting in toilet bowls.
On Monday, the New York Times reporter and CNN contributor released two images in which torn-up pieces of papers — with what appears to be Trump's distinctive handwriting in black marker — can be seen in toilets.
Haberman told CNN the images came from a Trump White House source; one was taken of a White House toilet and the other was during an overseas trip, she said.
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"Who knows what this paper was? Only he would know and presumably whoever was dealing with it, but the important point is about the records," Haberman said in an interview with CNN's John Berman and Brianna Keilar on New Day.
According to the Presidential Records Act, created in the years following President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal, the president must preserve all records created during their tenure so that they can be handed over to the National Archives and Records Administration.
Haberman first made the claims about Trump's penchant for flouting presidential record-keeping laws by flushing documents down the toilet in February, saying in an earlier interview with Keilar that the former president was known to clog the White House toilets by doing so.
"I learned that staff in the White House residence would periodically find the toilet clogged, the engineer would have to come and fix it and what the engineer would find would be wads of, you know, clumped up, wet, printed paper, meaning it was not toilet paper, this was either notes or some other piece of paper that they believed he had thrown down the toilet," Haberman said in February.
She continued: "What it could be, Brianna, could be anybody's guess. It could be Post-its, it could be notes he wrote to himself, it could be other things. But certainly does add, as you said, another dimension to what we know about how he handled material in the White House."
According to her reporting, the clogged toilets were "not an isolated incident" and they stemmed from Trump's White House bathroom.
RELATED: Trump Had a Habit of Ripping Up Presidential Documents — Like Those Sent to Jan. 6 Investigators
Trump, 76, has previously denied Haberman's reporting and the claims made in her forthcoming book, Confidence Man, a biography of the former president.
"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," Trump said in a February statement.
Trump has been accused of tearing up important files before, with the National Archives confirming earlier this year that some of the files it had received from Trump's time in office "included paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump."
Some of those ripped-up and reconstructed documents were reportedly among the more than 700 pages turned over to lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, The Washington Post reported.
In an interview on MSNBC in February, former Apprentice star and Trump aide-turned-enemy Omarosa Manigault Newman also said Trump made a "habit" of tearing up White House documents.
"His habit of tearing these things up ... my heart truly goes out to the people responsible for going in the trash bins [and] recovering these things. But there are certainly things that I'm sure cannot be accounted for because Donald Trump became very very aware that a lot of these sensitive documents would at some point be made public," Newman said on MSNBC.
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Newman also claimed that she once saw Trump "chewing" a document he had just torn up after meeting with his former attorney Michael Cohen in the Oval Office.
"After [Trump attorney] Michael Cohen left the office and I walked in to the Oval, Donald — in my view — was chewing what he had just torn up," she said, adding, "It was very bizarre because he is a germophobe he never puts paper in his mouth."
