Donald Trump apparently thinks little of the retention requirements in the White House. First the ex-US President tore up documents, now he broke the rules with letters from the controversial ruler.
Photo series with 19 pictures
–
At the end of his term in office, former US President Donald Trump apparently illegally took documents from the White House to his luxury estate Mar-a-Lago – including letters from North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un. The “Washington Post” reported on Monday that employees of the US National Archives had to pick up “numerous boxes” with documents in Mar-a-Lago, Florida in January. Among them were letters from Kim Jong Un and a letter from Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama.
A law states that a president’s written records must be turned over to the National Archives after the end of his term of office. According to the Washington Post, advisers to Trump deny that the former president acted in bad faith when he took the documents to Mar-a-Lago.
“They are great letters”
During his tenure, Trump had developed an unusually close relationship with the internationally ostracized Kim Jong Un, both of whom met several times in person and wrote letters to each other. “He wrote me beautiful letters, they’re great letters,” Trump told supporters in 2018. “We fell in love.” Since then, the US media has been talking about “love letters”.
As president, Trump was known for his lax handling of rules on official documents. Just last week, the National Archives said it had received documents that had been partially torn up and glued back together after Trump’s departure from the White House on January 20, 2021. Despite the obligation to retain documents, the Republican repeatedly tore up documents that then had to be repaired by White House employees.
According to a report by the Washington Post last week, the parliamentary investigative committee on the January 6, 2021 Capitol storming received documents from Trump’s tenure torn from the National Archives. The members of the panel want to use the documents, among other things, to reconstruct Trump’s behavior and his meetings and telephone calls on the day of the attack on the Capitol.
–
