Trump Claps Back At Claims He Flushed Docs Down The Toilet In White House: ‘Fake Story’

Unsurprisingly, former President Donald Trump denied reports that he’d dumped important documents in the toilet, as Twitter called him out for his attacks on Hillary Clinton over her deleted emails.

Former President Donald Trump fired back at claims that he’d flushed White House documents down the toilet in a statement on Thursday February 10. The 75-year-old ex president was responding to new allegations that are surfacing from an upcoming book by New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, where she claimed that White House staff had said that they’d occasionally find toilets clogged with papers from documents.

In a statement, tweeted by his spokesperson Liz Harrington, Trump denied that he’d taken part in any dirty work in destroying documents that should’ve been preserved for government records. “Another fake story, that I flushed papers and documents down a White House toilet, is categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book,” he wrote.

The reports that Trump had flushed wads of paper in White House toilet came in a preview of Haberman’s forthcoming book Confidence Man from Axios on Thursday. Other than the allegations that he’d flushed papers, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had requested the Justice Department to investigate Trump’s handling of documents after officials received boxes from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home that showed that some documents had been torn up, per The Washington Post. There are suspicions that Trump broke the Presidential Records Act, which is in place to preserve documents, by tearing up various documents.

Haberman further detailed the toilet clogging during an appearance on CNN. “I learned that staff in the White House residence would periodically find the toilet clogged. The engineer would have to come and fix it, and what the engineer would find would be wads of clumped up, printed, wet, printed paper. This was not toilet paper. This was either notes or some other piece of paper that they think that he had thrown down the toilet,” she said, while admitting that it wasn’t clear what exactly was on the papers.

Naturally, people proceeded to call out the former president for his attacks on his 2016 presidential opponent and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton due to her using a private email server and deleting thousands of emails. Many critics on Twitter called him out as hypocritical for consistently bringing it up, when he allegedly flushed documents of his own.

Other than the wet papers, Haberman explained how this was just one example some of the other issues the Trump administration had with document preservation. “It certainly does add, as you said, another dimension to what we know about how he handled material in the White House,” she told CNN. “[We know] that Trump was ripping up pieces of paper, and that his staff was having to tape it back together for archival purposes.”

Trump also responded to those allegations in his statement, saying that he passed documents over “easily” and “without conflict,” and it was “routine.” He also returned to his common accusations against Clinton and her controversial use of a personal email server. “In actuality, I have been told I was under no obligation to give this material based on various legal rulings over the years,” he said.