Former President Donald Trump often left pages of documents scattered over the floor of his White House office when he left for the evening, his valet testified before a grand jury, according to a newly obtained court filing.
The pages, which likely often contained sensitive intelligence information, were later collected by members of the White House Office of Records Management, according to the testimony in the filing obtained by New York Times reporter Alan Feuer.
"What I recalll is that everytime he would leave for the evening, they would come up, and they would collect all the papers that he threw on the floor," Trump's valet Walt Nauta told the grand jury.
Sources previously told the Washington Post that Trump also ripped up documents or his own notes and put them in a pocket or tossed them in a waste basket. He also flushed them down the toilet at the White House, Axios reported.
The practice was "relentless," and "widespread and indiscriminate," the Post reported
Trump not only tore up records later demanded by the House select committee probing the Jan. 6 insurrection, he also ripped up countless other letters, memos, articles, briefings and schedules — in violation of the Presidential Records Act, according to the Post.
Aides would sometimes retrieve shredded papers and tape them back together because they were public records. Others were forever lost to "burn bags."
"We had no rules" in the White House, Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a CNN interview after the reports. "We followed no rules."
Just in: Walt Nauta, Trump's valet, recalls in his grand jury testimony that officials in the White House Office of Records Management would pick up "all the papers" Trump "threw on the floor" each "time he would leave for the evening." pic.twitter.com/hW1aOfgTy3
— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) April 27, 2024
Trump's treatment of federal documents at the White House reveals what appears to be a lackadaisical attitude about the importance and security sensitivity of some of the papers.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to a 37-count indictment related to his removal of classified documents from the White House at the end of his term to Mar-a-Lago. He kept them in his personal office at Mar-a-Lago, a storage area near a pool accessible to all members of the club and their guests, stacked up in a bathroom and on a stage in an event room, according to federal investigators.
A date for Trump's trial in the case has not yet been set as Special Prosecutor Jack Smith and Trump's legal team spar in court over various challenges over evidence and rules of law.
