Former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvey said he saw former President Donald Trump shred documents while serving in office. “I saw the president tearing documents in half. Not classified documents, but just draft documents. You shouldn’t do that, but there is a way to fix it,” he said in an interview with CNN. “What, you just find the pieces and tape them together.” “I used to grab documents in the private sector all the time,” he continued. “It’s not a sign of bad intent.” The scrutiny over document retention under the Trump administration began in part after New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman revealed in a forthcoming book earlier this year that the president had clogged a toilet by flushing torn pieces of paper. Trump then denied the report, calling it a “fake story.” It is “categorically untrue and just made up by a reporter to get publicity for a mostly fictional book,” Trump said. But accounts from former aides — including Mulvaney — differed from what Trump said. Former Trump administration aides knew immediately when a document had been ripped from the former president, Insider previously reported. Trump had such a distinctive ripping style that it became known to his aides. He tore each document twice—once in half horizontally and once vertically—leaving the paper in four quarters. When aides saw those documents being torn up in this way, according to The Post, they knew immediately that Trump had done it. The former president would then leave the documents strewn across desks and in trash cans throughout the White House. Documents were also strewn across floors and aides found them in the Oval Office and on Air Force One. This month, the FBI searched the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida and recovered 11 boxes containing classified files that Trump took with him from the White House upon leaving office, according to court filings were made public on Friday. Some of the boxes are prominently marked as “top secret,” Insider’s Sonam Sheth reported. Under the Presidential Records Act, he should have turned the records over to the agency after leaving office. But Mulvaney in the CNN interview insisted there was a system in place to make sure that didn’t happen. “Staff are supposed to be involved,” he said. “If the president has confidential material on his desk at the end of a meeting, which is possible … the staff comes in to make sure all that stuff is gone and put in a proper place before the next meeting. “ “You can’t control the president,” Mulvaney continued. “The president is going to do what the president is going to do. But there are mechanisms within every West Wing that are functioning properly to ensure that the law is followed, documents are preserved and classified information is treated as classified information.”
