According to a report from the New York Times on the final days that Donald Trump occupied the Oval Office, from "day one" he told aides that any documents he dealt with as president were his personal property.
The report details the chaos at the White House just four days before the former president was supposed to make way for incoming President Joe Biden, saying boxes still sat empty and little was being done as the former president continued to fight to stay in office while also doling out pardons.
According to the Times, "In the area known as the outer Oval Office, boxes had been brought in to pack up desks used by President Donald J. Trump’s assistant and personal aides. But documents were strewn about, and the boxes stood nearly empty. Mr. Trump’s private dining room table off the Oval Office was stacked high with papers until the end, as it had been for his entire term," adding, "Upstairs in the White House residence, there were, however, a few signs that Mr. Trump finally realized his time was up. Papers he had accumulated in his last several months in office had been dropped into boxes, roughly two dozen of them, and not sent back to the National Archives. Aides had even retrieved letters from the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and given them to him in the final weeks."
As the report notes, the former president seemed to think anything he touched was his personal property even though he had been warned by White House attorneys that that was not the case.
Noting that Trump declared as he finally left, "We were not a regular administration," the Times reports that insiders agreed.
"His statement was indisputably accurate," the Times is reporting. "From his first hours in office, Mr. Trump had always taken a proprietary view of the presidency, describing government documents and other property — even his staffers — as his own personal possessions. 'They’re mine' is how he often put it, former aides said."
The Times adds, "But that was not the case. Under the Presidential Records Act, the law that strictly governs the handling of records generated in the Oval Office, every document belonged to taxpayers. Whether it was top security briefing materials, reams of unclassified documents automatically uploaded to a secure server in Pennsylvania or notes that Mr. Trump routinely ripped up or flushed down the toilet — all were government property to be assessed and, in most cases, transferred as part of the nation’s history to the National Archives."
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