The National Archives has said that some of the documents handed over by former president Donald Trump to the House Select Committee probing last year’s 6 January’s Capitol Hill riots had been ripped and had to be taped back.
In a statement to The Washington Post and CNN, the National Archives said that some of the records handed over by the White House “included paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump”.
While the National Archives did not confirm to CNN how it knew that the papers were ripped apart by Mr Trump himself, the Archives said that some documents had not been reconstructed at all.
“White House records management officials during the Trump Administration recovered and taped together some of the torn-up records,” the National Archives was quoted as saying in its statement.
“These were turned over to the National Archives at the end of the Trump Administration, along with a number of torn-up records that had not been reconstructed by the White House.”
“The Presidential Records Act requires that all records created by presidents be turned over to the National Archives at the end of their administrations,” it added.
In 2018, the Politico reported that the White House employed staff whose job included reconstructing communications and documents that the president would tear up.
The staff then had to use Scotch tape to piece together fragments of paper that were sometimes as small as confetti, after being ripped and shredded by the former president.
It is not yet clear what documents were included among those handed over to the House Select Committee.
The Archives started receiving the documents last month after the Supreme Court ruled against Mr Trump’s bid to block the release of the documents citing executive privilege.
Earlier in October, Mr Trump’s request to assert executive privilege was quashed by president Joe Biden, allowing them to be released.
Mr Trump also lost a challenge in a federal appeals court that also refused to block the documents.
In a court filing, the National Archives had said that the documents over which the former president sought to assert executive privilege included presidential diaries, schedules, appointment information handwritten notes concerning the events of 6 January from White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and speeches.
Last week Mr Trump hit out at the house committee’s probe and said that if he was re-elected he would pardon the participants of the 6 January insurrection.
