A group of records management analysts in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House has the most unusual assignment – taping together documents that President Donald Trump rips up as part of his unofficial ‘filing system.’
Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, Solomon Lartey and his team sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, Lartey told Politico, ‘like a jigsaw puzzle.’
Sometimes the papers would be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.
The president has the habit of ripping up papers when he is done with them
The Presidential Records Act requires all papers the president touches to be preserved at the National Archives
The Presidential Records Act requires the White House to preserve all memos, letters, emails and papers the president touches and send them to the National Archives for safekeeping.
But Trump has the odd habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them – what some aides call his unofficial ‘filing system.’
When staffers realized they wouldn’t be able to break the president of this now potentially illegal habit, they decided to clean it up for him, in order to make sure he wasn’t violating the law, Politico reported.
They had the fragments of paper collected from the Oval Office and the White House’s private residence and send to records management office across the street from the White House to to be re-assembled.
‘We got Scotch tape, the clear kind,’ Lartey told the news website. ‘You found pieces and taped them back together and then you gave it back to the supervisor.’
The restored papers are then sent to the National Archives to be properly filed away.
Lartey, who earned annual salary of $65,969 and is a career government official with close to 30 years of service, recalled he’d seen everything from news clippings to notes to invitations to letters from lawmakers.
‘I had a letter from Schumer – he tore it up,’ he said. ‘It was the craziest thing ever. He ripped papers into tiny pieces.’
Another records management staffer Reginald Young, Jr. said in over two decades of his government service, he had never been asked to do such a thing.
‘We had to endure this under the Trump administration,’ Young said. ‘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.’
The White House didn’t comment to Politico on the filing system used.
Trump’s system is a stark contrast to the Obama White House, which ran a structured paperwork process.
‘All of the official paper that went into [the Oval Office], came back out again, to the best of my knowledge’ said Lisa Brown, who served as Obama’s first staff secretary. ‘I never remember the president throwing any official paper away.’
A team across the street from the White House tapes together Trump’s papers to preserve them in compliance with federal law
President Donald Trump tosses a sharpie pen that he was using for autographs back to the group that greeted him after arriving on Air Force One at the Palm Beach International Airport for a visit to Mar-a-Lago Resort
Lartey, 54, and Young, 48, were both career officials who worked together in records management until this spring, when both were terminated from their jobs suddenly and without warning. Both men are unemployed and still have questions about why they were terminated.
Politico noted it was reporting on a story about the men’s sudden termination with no explanation when they described their job duties to the news site.
They did not approach a reporter with the intent to leak embarrassing information about the president, Politico notes.
‘The only excuse that I’ve ever gotten from them,’ Young said of his firing, ‘was that you serve at the pleasure of the president.’