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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTrump's stash of documents shows 'fragile' historical record
WASHINGTON (AP) As president, Donald Trump never liked to leave a paper trail. He avoided email, admonished aides to stop taking notes during meetings and ripped up documents when he was finished with them.
But Trump was unwilling to part with some of his administration's records when he left the White House last year, whisking them away to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Although more than a dozen boxes have since been returned to the government, the discovery alarmed archivists and historians who were already skeptical of Trumps commitment to transparency.
For them, the episode is not just a story about a presidential packrat or a sloppy filing system, but an example of how fragments of American history are at risk of being lost. Destroying or concealing documents, they said, could prevent future generations from understanding how important decisions were made.
My first reaction was words youre probably not allowed to print," said Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian. Academics rely on official records to paint a complete picture of every administration, and she said revelations about the documents at Mar-a-Lago were a reminder of "how fragile that process can be if people do not follow the rules.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-stash-documents-shows-fragile-172919321.html
lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)We lost a lot of time that could have been used to move the country forward (actually, we lost a lot of ground).
And we are now realizing that the inner workings of his corrupt machine will never be known in detail. This makes it more difficult to craft solutions to hobble the next Trump.
Claustrum
(5,058 posts)I knew they wouldn't follow normal protocols for keeping any record. If you don't record anything, you can't really say they specifically miss the record for his wrongdoing.
SoonerPride
(12,286 posts)We still haven't retrieved all the classified intel and documents.
Will we ever?
Doubtful.
I'm sure he ate them by now.