Two former White House aides appeared on CNN Tuesday morning to demonstrate how they arranged and taped together papers President Trump had ripped up.
Solomon Lartey and Reginald Young Jr., two former records management analysts, showed on CNN how they would tape together ripped up official documents so they could be filed and saved correctly.
“OK, then what were you both set about doing? Demonstrate it for us,” the CNN host requested of the two guests after they held up small pieces of ripped up paper to the camera.
Lartey and Young then went step by step through pouring the contents of the document on the table and arranging it together like a puzzle, then taping those pieces together.
Reports emerged Monday that Lartey and Young spent their days in the White House during the Trump administration reconstructing documents that the president had ripped into fragments so they could be preserved. They have since been terminated.
Any memos or official documents that are annotated by the president have to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act, but Trump has a habit of tearing up documents after he is finished with them.
Lartey said sometimes the papers were merely split down the middle, but other times he would spend hours reconstructing documents with scotch tape that had been ripped up so small that they looked like confetti.
