White House reportedly employs people to tape back the documents Trump rips apart
The White House reportedly pays its staffers to carefully tape the documents back together after President Donald Trump rips them apart, particularly the notes and memos which should be preserved under the law.
Former records management analyst Solomon Lartey, while talking to Politico, said: "We got Scotch tape, the clear kind. You found pieces and taped them back together and then you gave it back to the supervisor."
Two of the workers at the White House assigned with taping the documents back said that the Republican president keeps ripping documents without pay much attention to their value after.
Reginald Young Jr, who was one of the two men assigned for the work, was reportedly fired earlier this year along with Lartey.
Young told Politico: "I’m looking at my director, and saying, ‘Are you guys serious?"
"We’re making more than $60,000 a year, we need to be doing far more important things than this. It felt like the lowest form of work you can take on without having to empty the trash cans," Young said.
Reports state that all the documents given to the president must be preserved under the Presidential Records Act. Trump, however, has a habit of tearing up notes, memos and other important papers when he is done reading them.
According to Politico, some of the staffers in the White House have given a name to this habit of Trump's and call it his "unofficial filing system."
Lartey said that newspaper clips with notes from the president, invitations and letters were routinely torn up by Trump.
"I had a letter from (Sen. Chuck) Schumer (D-N.Y.) — he tore it up,” Lartey said. “It was the craziest thing ever. He ripped papers into tiny pieces."
The former staffers said that after the White House staff realized that they could not stop President Trump from ripping the documents and throwing them in the trash, they decided to take the matter in their own hands.
They collected fragments of papers from the Oval Office and also from Trump's private residence and then send them to records management across the street from the White House for reassembling.
Lartey and his colleagues would stand over their desks at the Old Executive Office Building and sift through large piles of shredded to put them back together "like a jigsaw puzzle."
Lartey added that sometimes the papers would be split down the middle but most of the times the torn up pieces would be so small they'd look like confetti, according to reports. The restored papers then reportedly are sent to the National Archives to be properly filed and stored.
Both the White House staffers said that they were fired on unfair grounds and added that workers in the White House are still taping together documents ripped by Trump.
The White House was not available for a comment on the claims made by the former staffers, according to Politico.