Ex-senator speculates Trump asked a lawyer how to keep his calls off the books
Over the weekend, it was revealed that the White House diarist noticed in the days leading to Jan. 6 former President Donald Trump's office began providing less and less detail about his daily behavior.
The White House has a non-partisan staffer who is there to gather all of the records to capture every movement of the president, as part of the Presidential Records Act. One detail, however, is that those records are then approved by a senior White House official. So, if there were records and they were destroyed, that's illegal.
Former senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) explained on Monday to Nicolle Wallace that she can see Trump intentionally working to keep things from being captured or recorded.
"It isn't a crime to create personal records in terms of the law," she explained. "It is a crime to destroy those records. So I could see him asking a lawyer, 'is it a crime for us not to create the record in the first place?' And saying, 'well, forget it, we're not doing it. Wipe that off -- we're not going to write anything down for the next seven hours.'"
New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt noted that it was notoriously difficult to capture Trump's movements because, unlike his predecessors, he didn't actually do much in the White House.
"Look, this was a president who didn't have a schedule," he noted. "During the Obama administration, I remember at The Times we were trying to get an interview with Obama and, they had to talk like six months out because every five minutes were planned. This is a president who came down to the oval office at 11:00 in the morning when he felt like it, and that's just a small example of the day-to-day operations of the West Wing. So, now you have investigators going back looking for very specific things and calls and whether it's incompetence or anything, it's not surprising that it's not there."
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