Trump Had a Habit of Ripping Up Presidential Documents — Like Those Sent to Jan. 6 Investigators
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Spencer Platt/Getty Donald Trump
The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol has reportedly received White House records from the National Archives that had been ripped up by Donald Trump and taped back together.
"Some of the Trump presidential records received by the National Archives and Records Administration included paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump," the National Archives confirmed in a statement.
More specifically, ripped-up and reconstructed documents were among the more than 700 pages turned over to Jan. 6 investigators, The Washington Post reported Monday. (The Jan. 6 committee did not respond to PEOPLE's request for a comment; neither did a Trump spokeswoman.)
Trump, 75, had fought to keep the bipartisan House of Representatives committee from reviewing the documents as part of their investigation into the deadly rioting last year.
But earlier this month, the Supreme Court rejected the former president's request to keep the records — including diaries, visitor logs, drafts of speeches and notes written by hand about the events of Jan. 6 — away from the committee.
When the White House turned over its records at the end of Trump's presidency, it included some that had been torn and taped and some that were still in pieces, according to the National Archives.
"White House records management officials during the Trump Administration recovered and taped together some of the torn-up records. These were turned over to the National Archives at the end of the Trump Administration, along with a number of torn-up records that had not been reconstructed by the White House," the archives' statement said.
RELATED: Jan. 6 Committee Requests Voluntary Interview with Ivanka Trump: 'You Were in the Oval Office'
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Trump has a longstanding habit of destroying files, per Politico, which reported in 2018 that he preferred to tear them up once finished with them — a problem after he took office.
Government employees were required to reconstruct the files, in keeping with the law.
"I had a letter from [Sen. Chuck] Schumer — he tore it up," one official told Politico. "It was the craziest thing ever. He ripped papers into tiny pieces."
The Presidential Records Act requires that official White House materials such as memos, letters, emails and other communications related to the president are owned by the public and must be preserved and sent to the National Archives as historical records.
In order to comply with this requirement, according to Politico's 2018 report, officials were tasked with sorting through piles of President Trump's ripped up pages as small as confetti and reconstructing them with Scotch tape to put them back together "like a jigsaw puzzle."
