A government photographer edited photos to make the size of President Trump’s inauguration crowd appear bigger after a request from the president.
Documents released to The Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act show the photographer cropped out the empty space where the crowd ended after Trump seethed over images showing his crowd size was smaller than his predecessor Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration.
Acting National Park Service Director Michael Reynolds received a call from Trump the morning after he was sworn in as president about the inauguration photos. Then-press secretary Sean Spicer repeatedly called NPS officials throughout the day to ask about more flattering photos, the Guardian reported.
An NPS communications official told investigators from the Interior Department’s inspector general that “she got the impression that President Trump wanted to see pictures that appeared to depict more spectators in the crowd,” and the photos released earlier showed “a lot of empty areas.”
The official said she “assumed” the photos Trump requested “needed to be cropped” but Reynolds did not specifically ask for cropping.
An official from the Park Service’s public affairs department told investigators that Spicer asked for photos that “accurately represented the inauguration crowd size.”
The photographer said he had been contacted by an official who asked him to “edit a few more” photos after he had already filed 25 photos of inauguration day. The photographer told investigators he had cropped the photos because he thought that’s what the official had wanted him to do, but he had not been specifically told to do so.
Later in the day, Spicer gave the now-infamous press briefing at the White House, falsely claiming that the previous day’s crowd “was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.”
The Guardian said that it’s unclear whether the edited photos were released publicly.
