December 25, 2024
Axios.com reported Monday that photos exist of ripped-up notes allegedly found in a White House toilet that staff believed were disposed of by then-President Donald Trump.

Axios.com reported Monday that photos exist of ripped-up notes allegedly found in a White House toilet that staff believed were disposed of by then-President Donald Trump.

Axios, which was sold Monday for over half a billion dollars, led coverage with images of torn notes in two toilet bowls.

The photos, if authenticated, would help to corroborate earlier claims that Trump disposed of White House documents in unconventional ways, raising questions about whether he violated federal laws on the preservation of government documents.

However, it is not clear if Trump himself flushed the notes. It is also not clear if the toilet is actually in the White House, or who would have used the president’s private lavatory. It is also not clear if the notes are official documents or personal ones. In fact, little is known beyond the existence of the photos.

Axios reported (formatting removed):

Remember our toilet scoop in Axios AM earlier this year? Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming book about former President Trump will report that White House residence staff periodically found wads of paper clogging a toilet — and believed the former president, a notorious destroyer of Oval Office documents, was the flusher.

Trump denied it and called Haberman, whose New York Times coverage he follows compulsively, a “maggot.
Well, it turns out there are photos. And here they are, published for the first time.

Haberman was a repeated beneficiary of leaks from the Trump White House and on-the-record comment by Trump himself, at a time when Trump was not speaking frequently to conservative news outlets. She later became a Trump media nemesis.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.