- Trump’s former press secretary described the chaotic way he handed records as president.
- Stephanie Grisham said that he would haphazardly move files from his offices to his private rooms.
- Her account touches on the same issues of document-handling that led to the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
Former Trump White House press secretary Stephenie Grisham said official records would “just disappear” when Trump was around.
Grisham, who worked for Trump from July 2019 to April 2020, said Trump would routinely take official files from the working areas of the White House to his private presidential residence.
She told The Washington Post, “Any documents that made it to the White House residence were these boxes Trump carried around with him.”
“Usually the body man would have brought them upstairs for Trump or someone from the outer-Oval at the end of the day,” Grisham said. “They would get handed off to the residence and just disappear.”
Grisham outlined how Trump often stored information in boxes: “There was no rhyme or reason — it was classified documents on top of newspapers on top of papers people printed out of things they wanted him to read. The boxes were never organized.”
“He’d want to get work done on long trips so he’d just rummage through the boxes. That was our filing system,” she said.
Trump’s habit of taking records to his residence concerned officials while he was in office, and towards the end of his term staff at the National Archives tried to get them back.
Instead, Trump ended up taking dozens of boxes of records with him when he left office in January 2021, prompting a legal tussle which culminated in the August 8 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.
