As scrutiny grows over Donald Trump’s handling of White House documents, a former official in his administration says his carelessness prompted other staff to behave the same way.
“He would roll his eyes at the rules, so we did, too,” former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham told The Washington Post. “We weren’t going to get in trouble because he’s the president of the United States.”
Ms Grisham, who served at a number of posts in the Trump administration, has become one of the former president’s fiercest critics since the 6 January Capitol riot.
When the news first broke that Mr Trump had hauled 15 boxes of White House documents – including some marked “classified” and “top secret” – to his Mar-a-Lago resort, she said she was “not surprised”.
“I think that what’s important is this is another example of a White House and an administration that just – we had no rules,” Ms Grisham told CNN. “We followed no rules.”
Ms Grisham also corroborated reports that Mr Trump often ripped documents to shreds – so often, in fact, that she wondered if it was a “nervous tick”.
“He always tore everything up,” she told the network.
Legally, those papers were supposed to be preserved. Under the Presidential Records Act, all White House documents from Mr Trump’s term should have been turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) when he left office.
According to multiple former aides, however, Mr Trump routinely destroyed such documents, while keeping others for himself. His reason for hoarding his correspondence with North Korea’s leader, for example, was obvious to Ms Grisham.
“He was beyond proud of those Kim Jong Un letters,” she told the Post. “He talked about them all the time, showed them to people all the time. He took those letters because he wanted them.”
According to Ms Grisham, Mr Trump was contemptuous of other rules as well. At one point during his presidency, she remembers voicing concern about the Hatch Act, a law that forbids certain types of political activity by federal employees. Mr Trump, she says, told her not to worry.
“Who’s the boss of the Hatch Act? It’s me,” the former president told her, according to Ms Grisham. “So say whatever you want.”
Mr Trump has repeatedly accused Ms Grisham of lying about her time at the White House, and denies any wrongdoing with regard to White House documents, which he says he has been turning over to NARA in a cooperative fashion.
“It is clear that a normal and routine process is being weaponized by anonymous, politically motivated government sources to peddle Fake News,” Taylor Budowich, a spokesperson for Mr Trump’s Save America PAC, told The Independent.
“The Fake News machine, powered by anonymous and politically-motivated sources, is running in overdrive this week, and the leftist media is complicit in spreading these lies.”
