WASHINGTON — They never thought they’d be piecing the presidency together.
Solomon Lartey and Reginald Young Jr. admitted to Politico their Trump administration jobs were to use rolls of Scotch tape to glue together papers that President Donald Trump destroyed.
The trained records management analysts made more than $60,000 a year to preserve presidential documents for the National Archives before they were abruptly fired earlier this year.
But the career professionals say their jobs changed when Trump came to the White House because the new commander-in-chief routinely rips up documents that needed to be preserved.
Under the Presidential Records Act, the White House must hold onto presidential records for safekeeping and historical purposes.
But staff had a hard time convincing Trump to ditch the habit of ripping up paper when he was finished and tossing the confetti-like pieces into the trash and on the floor.
So staff made the habit collecting the discarded, hand-shredded papers and sending them next door to the Old Executive Office Building where career staff had to tape them back together, “like a jigsaw puzzle,” Lartey said.
The shredded works included newspaper clippings that Trump marked up, memos and letters, including one from New York Sen. Chuck Schumer.
“I had a letter from Schumer — he tore it up,” Lartey said. “It was the craziest thing ever. He ripped papers into tiny pieces.”
The men said they had never been assigned to such a task in their years of government service. They were eventually terminated from their jobs without explanation, Politico reported, and they are seeking an explanation why.
The former employees revealed their odd job duties in an interview about their dismissals.
“We had to endure this under the Trump administration,” Young said. “I’m looking at my director, and saying, ‘Are you guys serious?’ We’re making more than $60,000 a year, we need to be doing far more important things than this. It felt like the lowest form of work you can take on without having to empty the trash cans.”
