The president rips up his notes into tiny little pieces while his lawyer opts for a shredder – yet neither can hide their paper trail

White House staff are running after the president with Scotch tape so they can stick pages he’s torn up back together. Two staffers have told Politico that the president tends to rip paper once he is finished with it, sometimes just in half, but sometimes in “pieces so small they look like confetti” which have to be pieced back into a document like a puzzle. The Presidential Records Act makes it law that almost any document the president touches must be preserved in the national archives.

The two senior staffers, Solomon Lartey and Reginald Young Jr, from the archive department, were tasked with Scotch-taping together Trump’s letters, including one from Chuck Schumer, which was ripped into particularly tiny pieces. Both were suddenly fired from the White House this year with no explanation as to why they had been let go after long careers in the civil service.

It’s not just White House staff who are desperately trying to piece together ripped paper. Federal prosecutors are in the process of reconstructing documents they found in Michael Cohen’s shredder. On 30 May, they told the US district judge Kimba Wood that they would need two to three more weeks to reconstitute the documents they had found.

There are many reasons why this White House, and those who have dealt with Donald Trump, might want to avoid a paper trail. But it seems that these attempts to destroy documents are being thwarted easily. So what does it take to properly destroy a document in the modern era?

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Most people destroy documents using a shredder. It’s a piece of office equipment that has one job: take something that can be read, and make it unreadable. But Bob Johnson, the CEO of the National Association for Information Destruction, says there’s a saying in his industry: if you’re an average person, using a traditional office shredder and depositing the remains in the garbage, “you’re simply telling the bad guys what to take”.

He says that the most famous kind of shredder, which made long strips of paper, is a thing of the past. But even the modern cross-cut shredder machines, which make small matchstick-like shreds, do not make it impossible to reassemble a document.

Since the second world war, people have been able to successfully reconstitute some shredded documents, but in the past 15 years, that process has quickly accelerated. Following the 2001 Enron scandal, a company called Churchstreet Technology opened with the express purpose of reconstructing shredded documents. In a number of precedent-setting cases, documents reconstituted by Churchstreet were admitted as evidence. Since then, law enforcement and other software companies have improved upon the technology.

In cases like the Mueller investigation, he says, it’s not difficult for investigators to piece together information shredded by a modern office shredder. “You’re talking about high-level investigators,” says Johnson. “They have access to scanners and software and high-speed computers.”

The vast majority of commercial information destruction now happens away from offices, conducted by third-party information disposal companies. Paper is most often pulped and recycled, meaning there are no remaining strands.



As those trying to destroy data get better at it, so does the technology to reconstruct the material. One thing is certain, though: Trump ripping a letter into little pieces is not a foolproof solution.