Now that Donald Trump has fought, and lost, and fought, and lost, and fought, and lost his attempts to block the release of White House documents, tranches of documents have started to arrive at the House Select Committee on Jan. 6. The arrival of those documents is part of why the last few weeks have been so filled with details on the expansive coup attempt that involved everyone from White House staff, to Congressional Republicans, to Republican chairs in several states.
But some of those documents have arrived at the committee in an … odd condition. As in, covered in transparent tape.
In describing the documents to CNN, representatives from the National Archives noted: “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 Presidential Records Act requires that all records created by the executive be turned over to the archives at the end of the term, but apparently Trump took the time to rip up some of his documents. Unfortunately for Trump, his scheme to hide his words was defeated by the nemesis of information shredders over the decade: Scotch tape. Which isn’t just transparent, but apparently capable of ensuring transparency.
In 2018, Politico reported on Trump’s habit of ripping up memos, briefings, and statements. Apparently, Trump’s years of leading a shady real estate firm and a line of failing casinos that were always under (fully justified) investigation left him with the habit of treating the trash can as his filing system.
As a result, National Archives staff, “armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape,” spent months sifting through the Oval Office receptacle, sifting through piles of paper from assorted sources, and reassembling them “like a jigsaw puzzle.”
The frustration of those involved was palpable. “We had to endure this under the Trump administration,” said one of the men assigned this none-too-thrilling task. “I’m looking at my director, and saying, ‘Are you guys serious?’ We’re making more than $60,000 a year, we need to be doing far more important things than this. It felt like the lowest form of work you can take on without having to empty the trash cans.”
$60,000 a year would be, in Trump terms, not enough to buy Melania’s hat. Still, according to the men, “Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.”
It would be very interesting to weigh each page that has come into the select committee, sorting them by the mass of tape required to reassemble their scattered parts. Because the level of shredding might very well be connected to just how much Trump did not want anyone to read them. Of course, those shreds might also measure personal animus, as one of the reportedly shred documents was a letter from Chuck Schumer.
Oh, and those men who had this job? They were both “abruptly terminated” and “stripped of their badges and marched off the White House grounds by Secret Service” in 2018 without explanation. White House officials refused to say why.
But even after they were gone, someone still collected the scraps. Then someone got out the tape. And now the select committee is getting the carefully reconstructed results.
It will be a perfect moment if, when Trump is finally indicted, it comes as the result of some document carefully reassembled from scraps by a career civil servant doing a frustrating job that should have been unnecessary. With American transparency in 2022 preserved by a roll of tape invented in 1930.
Oh, and if Trump should ever find himself in power again, one of the first things to go in the White House will be the smoke detectors. Because no one can reassemble ashes.
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