Trump documents may not reveal as much as expected: 'This was not a White House that operated in a normal fashion'
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump's efforts to block the National Archives from turning over his White House documents, but one reporter who covered that administration tried to lower expectations about what those could reveal.
New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt appeared Friday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," where he cautioned against getting too excited about the documents -- which would include everything from handwritten notes, email messages, drafts of speeches and meeting logs -- that will be turned over to the House select committee because he's not too sure there's all that many of them.
"The one thing that I've often sort of cautioned in talking to folks about those documents is that assumes this White House was operating in sort of a normal way, in a way that they were taking a lot of notes and they were sort of keeping track of things," Schmidt said. "This was not a typical White House in that sense. [Jan. 6] is certainly not a typical day, so I sometimes wonder how helpful those documents will be because this was not a White House that operated in a normal fashion."
"The president did not have a schedule on most days in the way a normal White House would," he added. "The president would saunter down to the Oval Office between 10:00 and 11:00 in the morning and sort of begin talking and begin his day."
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No matter what the documents show, the House select committee has two options once they receive them from the National Archives.
"What does the committee do with the documents?" Schmidt said. "Do they hold on to them and use them as investigative leads and then maybe publish parts of them as they put out a report, or does the committee release sections of the documents in the coming days? So that's what we're waiting on."
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