November 11, 2025 • 43 mins
In August 2022, on the day the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago to recover files from Donald Trump's first term, another allegation was swirling around – that presidential papers may have been flushed down a White House toilet. This raised a lot of questions. How many documents could a person flush down a toilet? Could they be recovered? Did the FBI ever investigate? Join hosts Jason Leopold and Matt Topic, and producers Heather Schroering and Sean Cannon, on a journey of sinkholes, fatbergs and the power of public record searches.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Matt, Hey, Jason, do you remember what we were
doing back in the summer of twenty twenty two. It
had to do with Donald Trump and some pretty unusual
allegations of document removal at the White House. Here, I'll
give you a hint.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
His staff used to periodically find wands of printed paper
clogging the White House toilets.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Hit it.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
I'm investigative journalist Jason Leopold. I spend most of my
days getting documents from the government.
Speaker 4 (00:29):
I'm attorney Matt Tapic, and I fight them in court
to open their files when they don't want to.
Speaker 5 (00:34):
From Bloomberg and no smiling.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
This is Disclosure, a podcast about buying loose government secrets,
the Freedom of Information Act, and the unexpected places that
takes us. The toilets. Matt, I can't believe we're still
talking about the toilets.
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Well, we never stopped talking about somebody allegedly flushing documents
down the toilet during Donald Trump's first term. Trump is
back in office. The toilets are more important than ever.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
And God, Matt, what a journey, What a perfect records journey.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
It started with the Zoom call back in August twenty
twenty two.
Speaker 6 (01:11):
Hang on I'm just searching YouTube.
Speaker 4 (01:14):
For toilet noises.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Our producers Sean and Heather were there for toilet noises.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Okay, we should estimate how many presidents records have fit
inside the toilet.
Speaker 5 (01:24):
We should, Matt, I mean, this is a big deal.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Presidents are supposed to save everything, yes, by law, and
if they're going down the toilet, then they're not going
to the National Archives like.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
They're supposed to exactly. This news cycle has moved so quickly,
and it wasn't just about the toilets.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Some Trump officials put select documents in so called burn bags,
where they were destroyed rather than preserved.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Former President Trump improperly took classified and even top secret
documents to his Mara Algo residents in Florida.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Again, these are allegations. Great, and then what happens.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Maggie Haberman, a New York Times reporter, tweets a picture
of a toilet that she got from a Trump White
House source. We now have pictures of Trump's toilet with
the flushed documents.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
I urge people to zoom in. You can see it's
a sharpie.
Speaker 6 (02:13):
You can see it's his handwriting.
Speaker 7 (02:15):
Describe that photo, Matt, Well, it's a toilet and I'm
looking down into the bowl and down at the bottom
is some ripped up pieces of paper with some all
camps sharpie.
Speaker 5 (02:26):
Writing on it.
Speaker 7 (02:27):
According to a source, this is a White House toilet.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
But here's the thing that's like bizarre to me, Like,
let's just think about this photo. Right in Siri, somebody
probably threw many pieces of paper in the toilet bowl,
flushed it, and not everything went through right. They didn't
just throw it in the toilet bowl and then walk away.
They absolutely flushed it.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
If you're one of these people who's taping back together
the ripped up things and you come across the presidential
record lying in the toilet, and you have a duty
to preserve it, I guess you don't put antendident, right,
So the picture is the preservation of the record that like,
that picture should end up in the National Archives.
Speaker 5 (03:07):
Oh, that will end up in the National Archives. Absolutely,
it's a presidential record. It may in the toilet.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
I mean it's got his handwriting on it.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
That absolutely ends up and the presidential ogurn.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
So now all this stuff Trump said before about toilet
capacity being too small.
Speaker 8 (03:23):
People are flushing toilets ten times, fifteen times, so EPA
is looking at that very strongly, at my suggestion.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
Seeks showers and toilets, toilets, toilets.
Speaker 9 (03:34):
We won't talk about toilets, toilets, toilets.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
And what goes with a sink of a shower.
Speaker 5 (03:40):
It all makes just perfect sense.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
But Matt, what happened next hours after that toilet picture
emerged more big news drop.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
FBI has executed an unprecedented search warrant at President Donald
Trump's mar A Lago estate.
Speaker 10 (03:55):
We know the Justice Department has an active investigation into
the former president.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
The age of FBI agents on mar Alago supposedly related
to all the records that were taken.
Speaker 7 (04:05):
So you got to wonder how many public records have
gone down the toilets, what happened to them?
Speaker 5 (04:10):
Where did they go?
Speaker 7 (04:11):
Did anyone go looking exactly?
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I was like light bulb, got a FOI of that.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
So I blanketed all these agencies, Apartment, Homeland Security, Secret Service, FBI, CIA,
and SA POJ so basically everybody.
Speaker 11 (04:28):
But what kind of records did you ask for?
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Records about either flushing certain documents down the toilet or
just records of that were brought to mar A Lago
and sort of looking for any kind of communications or discussions,
budget records, how many people that they get there to
try to piece things back together. So it was a
very broad request to all these different agencies, and I
(04:49):
got a response from the FBI, and FBI responded with
what's known as a glomar. They said that they can
either confirm nor deny you know that these records exist, yes,
because to do so would be tantamount to acknowledging the
existence or non existence of an investigation. So that was
like the first clue that the FBI was investigating this.
(05:12):
I reached out to Matt and I said, Hey, I
want to file some lawsuits. Matt kindly agreed to that,
and we suit all of the agencies that I followed
requests with five separate lawsuits for all of these records
related to bringing documents tomorrow lago.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
So these are for records were moved from the White
House that would cover allegations of documents flushed, hauled out
in bags or getting taken to mar a lago. Right,
So when we file a suit in the complaint, if
it gets linked somewhere or it's like embedded in an
opening paragraph, that's the only thing you're going to see,
so we try to make that kind of plungey. So
(05:48):
this one says, playing if Jason Leopold brings his Freedom
of Information Act suit to force defendants Federal Bureau of
Investigation and he was proudor of Justice to produce documents
about any presidential records luting classified records, it were removed
from the White House to borrow lago or flush down
White House toilets, potentially in violation of federal law.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
So we file the lawsuits and then we wait and
we wait.
Speaker 7 (06:13):
But says you couldn't help yourself. I know you didn't
stop there.
Speaker 5 (06:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
I had this amazing source. She worked in the government,
and she.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Told me that when the news was surfacing about destroying
records and flushing down the toilet, she gave me this
great insight, and she told me to hit up GSA,
the General Service Administration, and the National Park Service because
the toilet in the Oval office is sort of overseen
(06:43):
by the White House Usher's office. If that guests clog
or they need to have someone come out and repair it,
that comes from like usually GSA.
Speaker 5 (06:52):
So anyway, I'm just looking at it now.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Was a perfect request met all records of clumbing calls
for former President Trump's residents bathroom toilet and the toilet
next to the Oval Office, and notes and reports related
to those health all records of plumbing repairs and fixture
replacement invoices, contracts, photographs. Because if you're sticking paper in
the toilet, I mean you would think.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
I would get clogged. I filed this request.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
What I thought was like, oh, this is such a
good request, they must have records. I ended up getting
this response from GSA, and it says, mister Leopold, thank
you for taking the time to speak for me today.
For issues like a clogged toilet in the Oval Office,
it is the Usher's Office, which is part of the
Executive Office of the President, which would be the ones
to handle that type of issue. GSA would potentially have
(07:38):
records related to the larger repairs of the toilet in
the White House, but the Usher's Office is the one
that conducts the maintenance in the White House residents and
therefore would not have records related to any restrooms in
that part of the building.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
So I didn't get any records.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
But I had no idea about this.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
I feel like I got this amazing education on the
White House toilet, which I think is a really important
thing to have.
Speaker 4 (08:02):
Right now, you're saying, if it just needs to be plunged,
then the usher's office deals with it. It's a presidential
record exactly, So that's a dead end.
Speaker 12 (08:13):
You can't foil those yet. The Presidential Records Act, that's
the law that governs presidential records which are outside SCOPEFOYA
makes you wait five years before anything is available, And personally,
I think this is ridiculous. The president has an incredible.
Speaker 5 (08:29):
Amount of power.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
We should be allowed to monitor the president and hold
the president accountable just as much or even much more
than federal agencies. And then if it's bigger, if it's
big enough, if it's like this is so bad it's
in the pipes, they got to come out and roday.
Speaker 5 (08:45):
I then it's a GSA.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
So if it didn't flush enough to make.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Make a GSAH, they had no records, man, So that's
it right, Hold on a second, we might be on
our own figure this out. So I just went down
some rabbit holes with our producers, Heather and Sean. Not
everything you flush causes trouble immediately, So we wondered if
you flush a lot of papers and they get past
(09:09):
the White House itself. Could there be some sort of sign.
Speaker 6 (09:14):
Honestly, the reality of there being actual sewage problems because
of this is it could check out because there were
these big sinkholes both at the White House and on
mar A Lago's lawn, and the theory was that it
really to sewage lines.
Speaker 5 (09:32):
Oh my god, wait, is there like stories about this.
Speaker 6 (09:36):
I'm reading a Forbes article in twenty eighteen that talks
about these sinkholes, the sinkhole in the White House lawn,
and it says, almost precisely a year ago, a massive
sinkhole appeared in the front of the Marra A Lago resort.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Hold On, hold on, hold on? Is this a pattern?
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Who knowse we got to look into this, all right,
So we went on a little bit of a journey
here trying to get more details about whether it was
even possible for something like flushing papers to cause a sinkhole.
And Sean might be on a watch list now thanks
to a post he made in the Washington DC subreddit.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
I just got a terrifying comment on Reddit.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
A lot of people in this sub or government workers
with security clearances, and this very odd and very specific
question about the White House sewage system will set off
people's suspicious radar.
Speaker 6 (10:28):
Jun's day off Reddit.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
I'm deleting it right now. I'm hitting delete. I don't
want the FBI showing up at my door. Are you
the toilet bomber?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Did you delete it?
Speaker 6 (10:36):
Because now I think it's even more suspicious.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
I thought that the moment after I hit delete.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Too, okay, But then Matt, we finally finally hit pay dirt.
Speaker 7 (10:48):
Ye.
Speaker 10 (10:48):
Imagine like going going to Harvard or Stanford and getting
you know, this law degree and becoming a page and
going to the White House and somebody.
Speaker 9 (10:55):
Handing you a plunger.
Speaker 5 (10:57):
This is Patrick Arner.
Speaker 10 (10:58):
I mean, it's my living so I mean I'm out
shying away from it.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
But come on, He's what you might call a celebrity
presidential plumbing expert. He became a media darling during the
pandemic and even talk to other media outlets about, well,
this subject, exactly what would happen if someone at the
White House flushed documents down the toilet?
Speaker 5 (11:18):
First, we wanted to.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Know what happens when you flush paper down the toilet.
Speaker 5 (11:22):
In general, it's.
Speaker 9 (11:23):
Going to depend on what kind of paper we're talking about.
Speaker 10 (11:25):
I mean, you can't flush down baby wipes down a
toilet without it becoming a major issue. If you start
using you know, printer, paper, card stuck anything like that,
you know you're going to have pretty severe issues pretty soon.
It's going to be pretty apparent pretty quickly.
Speaker 4 (11:43):
Well, I guess the question remains, will the papers go
down the toilet? In a normal situation, It'll.
Speaker 10 (11:48):
Go down the toilet more than likely, but it probably
won't make it past the trap of the toilet.
Speaker 9 (11:54):
And if you look on the side of a toilet
you kind of see like an.
Speaker 10 (11:56):
S shape, that's your trap. But especially if you're looking
at I guess something that's called a pressure assistant toilet,
which you would find in a lot of commercial applications, you.
Speaker 9 (12:05):
Know, very nice houses. Those will absolutely do it.
Speaker 10 (12:07):
In fact, you go to Home People or Low's tomorrow,
you'll see toilet that are advertise that you can flush
pulballs down.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
Impressive. God bless America.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
I love this guy Patrick because he's so serious about
the work that he does. Let's see what he has
to say about what might happen if the Oval office
toilets are able to flesh a pool ball and the
papers make it down into the pipes of the White House.
Speaker 10 (12:31):
It depends on what type of piping we're gonna have
on the sewer. Originally there was probably piping that was
made out of logs, literally logs. Odds are right now
it's PBC, which is standard. It's where you have what
I have, what most people have.
Speaker 9 (12:46):
Odds are.
Speaker 10 (12:47):
What's happening is it's getting flushed down and it would
make it a ways down the line until it either
you know, comes to a belly in the line where
the line actually dips and SAgs a little bit, or
maybe it possibly makes a bend.
Speaker 9 (13:01):
In essence, what will end up happening is it'll almost
form like a small net.
Speaker 10 (13:04):
It only needs to catch a small a small part
of a bend or you know, a fitting that's jutting
out slightly, and then it now creates a net and
it just starts grabbing waste, foreign objects like paper, feminine projects,
anything like that.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Incredible, okay, And you would think, first of all, it's
the president, he has a super secret toilet. No, this
underscore is that the president is just like every other person.
It's you know, it's it's just a regular toilet. PVC piping,
I'm one of you. I mean, basically, what Patrick is
saying is that if you flush these foreign objects down
(13:41):
the toilet, it's it's sort of going to create a
traffic jam. Right, What could that lead to?
Speaker 10 (13:45):
If there is that belly, if there is a bend,
if there's a weak spot in line, you actually have
a strong potential of too much pressure building up and
forcing a separation and the line. If a line is weak,
if it's cast iron piping, which is possible, it could.
Speaker 9 (14:04):
Be deteriorating already.
Speaker 10 (14:06):
So you start having all these objects, you know, start
piling up, piling up, and all this pressure starts backing up.
Eventually something's gonna give you did see, They're going to
back up the way it came, or it's going to
burst the pipe.
Speaker 5 (14:17):
Oh wow, I know.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
Right, Okay, So just to recap, here's where we are
with the baber's in the toilet. Let's say they've cleared
the toilet, they've gone through, they've cleared the white house.
Now they're out of the yard, and they hit a
bend in the pipes. There's this big backup and now
the pipe's ruptured, right, yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker 9 (14:39):
And then you have two things that'll happen.
Speaker 10 (14:41):
Either sewage can start to seep up out of the
ground depending on how deep the pipe is, or it
can start settling underneath the pipe and starting to spread
out and start actually eroding the soil and the dirt
and all the compaction.
Speaker 9 (14:55):
That you have in that area. This isn't just a theory.
Speaker 10 (14:59):
This is actually a pretty prevalent issue something at insurance
companies look for. In fact, there's been major issues in Chicago,
major issues in San Francisco where sewage lines. First, the
compaction's not properly done if maybe it wasn't a grade,
and that soil in that dirt starts to erode, and
then sinkholes can the potentially start to fill.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
Matt sinkholes, sink holes, sinkholes.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
In May of twenty eighteen, there was a sinkhole on
the White House lawn and it was spreading and.
Speaker 5 (15:29):
There's more of that.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
We gave Patrick a photo of the White House sinkhole
to get his take on it.
Speaker 10 (15:35):
I can't definitively say and I gotta say that, but
if you look at it, it's not just forming, you know.
Speaker 9 (15:41):
A perfect oval or a perfect circle.
Speaker 10 (15:43):
It almost looks linear where it's starting to slope downwards.
And when you have sewage piping, you have something called grade.
You have to have a certain amount of grade when
it comes to sewer pipes because it's all gravity fed.
The waste must slowly roll downhill. That looks like a
going linear and it looks like it's going downhill towards
a road which would probably tie into a city sewer
(16:07):
or potentially tie into a city sewer.
Speaker 5 (16:09):
Okay, so, Matt, so this is my theory.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
This is you know, I see the reports about sinkholes
over the years, including sinkhole at Mora Lago, and you
know pictures of toilet with papers with Trump's handwriting on it.
I'm not stating definitively here that papers going down the
toilet created that sinkhole in twenty eighteen, but that sinkhole
was a big deal in twenty eighteen. And now Patrick
(16:34):
tells us that one way in which that can happen
is by flushing papers down the toilet. Come on, man,
what do you think about that? That's that's serious? Yeah,
I mean we got to get Patrick. We we neat
Patrick as an expert witness to testify in our Foya
case to get people down there.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
There's no foil. I mean, there isn't. This is the problem.
The problem is there isn't a foyer case. At the
end of the day, the problem is you, the American public,
according to our laws, don't have a right to know
whether the president flushed records down the toilet. You don't
get to know that. And you also don't get to
know whether, if that happened, he caused a sinkhole. Therein
(17:14):
lies the problem. Jason Toy is great on a lot
of things, but when it comes to presidential records, there's
a gaping hole.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Well okay, fair, fair, But what do you think about
the fact that he's saying that you know that this
could cause a sinkhole, and that there actually was a
sinkhole on the White House long.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
I mean, we have some solid, circumstantial evidence that there
was regular flushing of papers down the toilet that led
to a sinkhole.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
I just want to note this was in twenty eighteen, right, Yeah,
but there was also another sinkhole in twenty nineteen, another
one in twenty nineteen, there was another one, and in
addition to that, there was also a sinkhole at Mara
a Lago in twenty seventy. Oh well, so, Matt, we've
made it all the way to the White House lawn
(18:03):
and we think that document flushing could have caused the sinkhole.
But remember there was another part of this document journey.
There's a chance that documents made it through the White
House pipes and out.
Speaker 5 (18:14):
Into DC's being a smull sewer.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
System, and we're going to get into that on the
other side of the break, Heather, I want to go
on a sewer tour.
Speaker 6 (18:26):
You really want to go on a sewer tour. So
with all this talk of sinkholes and allegedly flushing stuff
down the White House toilet, I thought it might be
interesting to see if there had ever been any major
obstructions in the sewer near the White House. So I
made a request with DC Water for reports and investigative
(18:48):
records regarding quote, large obstructions caused by a buildup of
non biodegradable solids in the DC sewers that DC Water
dealt with from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty three. That
time frame captured the entire Trip administration and the Biden administration,
or at least what we had had of it so far,
(19:08):
and it took a few months, but finally I got
more than nine hundred pages of material in three different
data sets, which was a lot.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (19:16):
So to see what happened where I built something? Can
I get a drum roll?
Speaker 5 (19:28):
Double bass, drum roll? Whoa what? So you made this?
I made this?
Speaker 4 (19:33):
Okay, you got skills.
Speaker 7 (19:34):
Wow?
Speaker 6 (19:35):
I love maps. Does someone want to describe what they're seeing?
Speaker 4 (19:38):
Well, yeah, this is Dcwater Reports twenty sixteen to twenty
twenty three, and there's a green DAT for the White House,
so it looks like it's about I don't know, a
couple square miles worth. And then there's a bunch of
different colored dats that are kind of scattered all around,
like dupot circle, logan circle, Chinatown. And there's red dots
(20:01):
and red squares, in blue dots, in dark blue dots.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So these are all sewer obstructions reported near the White House.
Speaker 6 (20:08):
Yes, that was a perfect explanation, all of these dots.
There are different markers on the screen here, and the
different colors are for the different terms. So red means
that Trump was an office, and light blue means Biden
was an office, and dark blue actually represents Obama's final
year in office because I had just a little bit
(20:29):
of data from there. One thing to note here, all
the addresses were actually redacted, so unless it's an intersection here,
these dots are not exact. They're more like block numbers.
What I was able to.
Speaker 4 (20:40):
Do so they gave you to like to the eight
hundred black or the twelve hundred black exactly.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
So if you go over to the folders where it
says Obama, Trump, Biden, you can turn off Obama, you
can turn off Biden, you can turn off Trump, you know,
so you can isolate each of these groups here looking
at all, what I noticed is that most of the
incidents in the immediate vicinity of the White House are red.
Speaker 5 (21:10):
And who likes wearing red ties.
Speaker 6 (21:13):
Let me just say how this breaks down. We have
four years of incidents from Trump and roughly for from
non Trump administrations. I made a second request to get
the rest of the Biden years, but as you know,
it sometimes takes a long time to get records back.
Speaker 8 (21:25):
Right.
Speaker 6 (21:26):
But if we're just looking at incidents within a block
of the White House grounds, then there are thirteen within
a block during the Trump years versus two from Biden
and two from Obama. So I just wondered, is it
even possible for someone, say in the Oval office, to
(21:49):
cause trouble for their neighbors of their flushing stuff down
the toilet that's not supposed to be flushed. So I
called up our friend Patrick Garner again, and here's what
he had to say.
Speaker 10 (22:01):
Yes, one hundred percent, especially if they're on a combined
which you've eliminated that they are.
Speaker 6 (22:05):
What he means there is a combined sewer system, which
basically means that to save money, these cities built the
same pipes for the storm water and for waste to
travel through instead of separate pipes, where as the storm
water and the waste would have their own tubes. And
most of the sewer system in this area, specifically around
(22:28):
the White House, is on a combined sewer system. So
all of the dots that you're seeing on this map
are in the combined sewer system, which means that they
share the same roadways essentially, So if there's a blockage
from one address, it's definitely causing issues upstream.
Speaker 9 (22:47):
Think of it as a slide and a bunch of
kids are going down. You've blocked that slide.
Speaker 13 (22:51):
Everybody that's trying to get into that slide is now
backed up and they're going to be affected.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
That is such a great visual, although can I just
say that the children on the slide and my visual
are giant pieces.
Speaker 6 (23:03):
Of Okay, So one thing we don't know is exactly
which direction those pipes flow from the White House, or
even what the pipes are like now, and you can
imagine why the government would want to keep that a
bit of a secret. But I did do a ton
of research on this and I found some really useful
information thanks to a few nerds who really love tunnels.
(23:23):
I found this article from nineteen thirty four where this
reporter does a sewer tour whoa, and he traveled through
all the tunnels, which are so crazy.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
This is when I'm glad I'm the lawyer and not
the reporter.
Speaker 5 (23:35):
Have fun, buddy.
Speaker 6 (23:36):
I found this really old map from the eighteen nineties
that actually did have some pretty comprehensive information about the
pipes coming out of the White House, down to the
size of the pipes and everything, but it's super old.
And then I found this better map from the nineteen eighties,
and I actually sent some friends on an expedition to
the Library of Congress to retrieve it and take some
(23:57):
pictures of it. It shows some pipes sort of snaking
through that park just south of the White House. So
I can't be certain, but what I do know is
that the main pumping station that takes all of the
sewage to the treatment plant is southeast of the White House.
And this stuff is all way more complicated, especially when
it rains, but it at least shows a path the
(24:17):
sewage could travel.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
So where did we leave off with Patrick?
Speaker 6 (24:21):
Okay? So one of my questions to him was, like,
if hypothetically somebody at the White House who's putting stuff
down the toilet is causing trouble for their neighbors, how
far like are we talking like a block or two
blocks or further?
Speaker 13 (24:34):
So you would have to put down a great deal
to be affecting anything past like a block or two,
to be honest with you, But you could flush something
at the White House, allegedly whatever, and cross pass like
three addresses and nobody has an issue, and you're carrying
the same waste, and now you're at an address that
has to be part of my friend's cast Iron or
(24:55):
Orangeburg or something, and now their pipes are becoming more narrow,
so even if if that bypasses a couple of addresses,
it could still very much be of issue somewhere else.
Speaker 9 (25:05):
Water and waste travels. It can be very, very very deceptive.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
So for example, if it was say a couple of
White House documents and like a couple of big mac rappers,
and he did that all at once, that could do it.
Speaker 6 (25:19):
So in my follow up call with Patrick, he actually
had a question.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
For me out of curiosity.
Speaker 13 (25:25):
Did you see if those dates are corresponded with any
current events around that time.
Speaker 6 (25:31):
Any major events from the Trump administration?
Speaker 5 (25:34):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Interesting, good sleuthing, Patrick and Heather.
Speaker 6 (25:38):
Well, I did look into this, and here's what I found.
The first one is May eleven, twenty seventeen, and that's
a twentieth Street and G Street Northwest. Does anybody remember
what happened in May twenty seventeen?
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Me think, Let me think, Robert Maler, keep going. Muller
was appointed special counsel.
Speaker 6 (25:57):
So on May ninth, twenty seventeen, FBI Director James Comy
was fired.
Speaker 4 (26:03):
Oh, Comy was fired, and then two days later there's
this event. Oh so it just as problem obstructed caused, grease, remedy, decreaser.
Speaker 6 (26:14):
So not a ton of information there, obviously.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
But if you wanted to get rid of documents, that
would be a good time, right.
Speaker 6 (26:20):
I mean, what we do know is that there was
an obstruction and it's almost on the same block as
the White House one two three blocks to the west.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
At that time, and we would have to check the
economies in the toilet.
Speaker 5 (26:34):
No pun intended that These.
Speaker 6 (26:36):
Next two incidents from July twenty eighteen, they're both on
the same block, which is the eight hundred block of
Connecticut Avenue, just north of the White House North Lawn.
And both of these incidents happened both before and after
Trump's meeting with Putin at the helsy Key Summit. There
are a few more of these incidents, but listen, this
(26:59):
is all obviously circumstantial.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
It's all a circumstance, Yes, sir, I think this should
call pa circumstantial.
Speaker 6 (27:06):
Not to be a lawyer or anything, but guess it
is interesting that these incidents are super close to the
White House. And I did ask Patrick about that, and
you know, he basically was like, based off of what
you're showing, just that there's a huge increase of events
around the White House and then a big drop off
during the next president's term, Like, it's not crazy to
(27:27):
think that people putting stuff down the toilet is causing
a bunch of trouble for their neighbors. And that's his
professional opinion as a plumber. I mean, listen, this doesn't
prove anything. The flow path may not be what we expect,
but it's plausible to think that it does flow in
some of the areas that we're seeing on this map here. Okay,
case closed, no case open, Matt, case open. But this
(27:54):
is also just the power of the FOYA is that
you can get all of this information in a bunch
of different ways, and I was able to visualize it
in some way totally.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
So we have an idea that there may have been
some instructions.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Right, So Sean, our producer, wondered if there might be
a way to actually retrieve those documents after they'd been flushed, since,
after all, these are presidential records and the law does
require that they be preserved.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
All right, I want to interject for a second, because
there's a thing called a fat bird. I don't know
if you guys are familiar with this phrase. No, Well,
it's essentially where a bunch of sewage kind of congeals
into a giant mass in the sewers. My point is
there is a chance that some intrepid splunkers could find
(28:45):
these documents in the sewage system somewhere, if you can
get to it.
Speaker 9 (28:51):
All right, let's play that out a little bit.
Speaker 5 (28:53):
That's amazing. By the way, where.
Speaker 9 (28:55):
Does the White House flushings?
Speaker 5 (28:58):
Where do they go?
Speaker 4 (28:59):
They go into the city of DC's like sanitary system.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
That's by the way, guys, I truly think this is
a great story and would like to pitch it like this.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
This feels like, I don't know, a Nicholas Cage movie.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
My question, Jason, then, is, if we can figure it out,
are you willing to fly to d C with us,
put on some very very tall waiters and go looking
for these fat birds?
Speaker 9 (29:24):
Well, let me just ask this, what would we find fatbirds?
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Yes, giant giant masses of waste, potentially with the paper
still in it.
Speaker 5 (29:34):
Yeah, but what the paper are disintegrated by?
Speaker 10 (29:37):
Now?
Speaker 4 (29:37):
Okay, Jason, please tell me we found some sort of
answer at least would the paper be there?
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Well, we asked our pal Patrick about fat bergs.
Speaker 10 (29:47):
That's a disgusting and also very interesting theory and probably
also a metaphor for our time right now.
Speaker 7 (29:52):
But I don't know.
Speaker 9 (29:53):
I mean, it's theoretically possible.
Speaker 10 (29:55):
I don't know if it would be legible or anything,
because at that point everything would be and jealing together.
Speaker 9 (30:01):
Who knows. I mean, that's something that's gonna haunt my
dreams tonight.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
So not the answer we were looking for from Patrick.
But we did find someone with a little more direct
knowledge about fat birds, and you'll hear from him after
the break. Believe it or not, Matt, we have an
expert on fat burgs. I want to say, ranow to
expert who also has one of the greatest names I've
(30:29):
come across in a while.
Speaker 5 (30:30):
Are you ready? Yeah? His name is doctor Love.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
I'm sorry wait wait wait wait wait wait his name
is doctor Love.
Speaker 5 (30:39):
His name is doctor Love.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
I'm calling doctor Love.
Speaker 4 (30:42):
Go to doctor Love, the Doctor of Love.
Speaker 5 (30:45):
Do you have to pay for that?
Speaker 4 (30:46):
Can we please get Gene Simmons on the pod to
talk about Gene Simmons would probably have some really interesting
things to say about this.
Speaker 5 (30:52):
Yeah, I'll bet he would.
Speaker 8 (30:54):
I'm John Love. I'm the professor of synthetibology at the
Universe of Exeter. The main focus of my work is
reprogramming bacteria for the development of biofuels to replace the
fuels and the chemicals that come from petroleum.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Doctor Love's work studying biomass brought him into contact with
a pretty big fat burg in England. In fact, it
was about the size of three school buses. Local authorities
sent out an email to a bunch of folks asking
if anyone wanted to do some research on it.
Speaker 8 (31:26):
Really, I thought, gosh, everybody will be wanting a piece
of this, but it turned out I was the only one.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
I think I already see where this is going, which
is that one day, potentially my car could be running
on biofuel. It was made from presidential records that were
flushed down the White House toilet, right.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
Sure, I guess my car as well.
Speaker 11 (31:45):
And it was super super interesting because we needed to
get samples of the thing. And really, these chaps, they're
wearing their clothes, and then on top of that they've
got like a wetsuit or a biohazard suit essentially, and
on top of that they have like a spilunking suit
with they've got respirators and everything, and then they're because
(32:07):
it's almost like as unwieldy as a space, so they're
they're winged in this manhole. Then they have to use
these high powered lances to degrade the fats, so just
sort of and then get chunks from it.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
Get some chunks from it too much?
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Oh yeah, Matt, do you want to do you want
to know what a fatburg looks like?
Speaker 4 (32:30):
It does a hard pass? My friend, I am I
am completely disinterested in the graphic details of what a
fatburg looks like. I mean, I can't stop you.
Speaker 8 (32:39):
It's not flappy or floppy, but it is crystalline, so
it's friable. But it's a bit like have you ever
touched talcum powder?
Speaker 7 (32:49):
Rock?
Speaker 4 (32:50):
No, get out of here, come on.
Speaker 5 (32:53):
And then, Matt, there's this smell.
Speaker 9 (32:55):
It smells awful.
Speaker 4 (32:56):
Are we are what are you read the jerky boys here?
What are we doing with the smell of the fat burg?
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Okay, well we can tie it back to the documents.
Here's Sean bringing in it all full circle with doctor Love.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
One material that we're interested in is just paper, like
everyday stationary, particularly if it's fancier stationary that you might
find and say like an official government office.
Speaker 8 (33:25):
Yeah, are you thinking about Donald trumps stuff and his papers?
Speaker 10 (33:29):
Down?
Speaker 9 (33:29):
The toilet.
Speaker 4 (33:30):
That he's a quick one, Doctor Love. That's good.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
So now that we know a little bit more about
fat burgs, and now that doctor Love knows about why
we're asking, let's figure out whether or not papers would
disintegrate in this hypothetical document flesh fat burg.
Speaker 8 (33:45):
Well, if it were covered in fat, it wouldn't necessarily
degreat because now it's an aerobic for a star, so
there's no oxygen. The paper is made of sell of
those which by its nature is actually quite difficult to
digest anyway. This is why it takes a whole season
for leaves, for example, to just form mulch. So in
(34:08):
these particular conditions, it probably could happen that you might
find the paper.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
That is remarkable. That would mean then that if presidential
records were flushed down the toilet and formed the fat bird,
they would remain intact sufficient that they would still have
their documentary value. Right like you could you could you
could remove it from the fat burg and read it
(34:35):
is what it sounds like?
Speaker 1 (34:36):
The answer is not, well, yes to an extent, because
doctor Love also describes, like what would happen if when
you pulled it out, what it would look like.
Speaker 8 (34:46):
If you're looking for a legible piece of paper. That
might be harder because I don't know what would happen
to the end. For example, I know that, for instance,
this is my calendar and it's from a jet a
jet printer, and if I get this wet, it just
all smears and doesn't really work out very well. So
(35:07):
that's part of the problem. So you might find, you know,
a nice piece of paper with officers of the President of
the United States written on it, for example, but just
a blur or smear. So I don't know if you'd
be able to find a document that would be legible,
but maybe you have.
Speaker 11 (35:25):
It's almost like we're getting into to the X files
at this point.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
Please tell me. We ask him about permanent marker, because
it looks like, I mean, the picture the Haberman pictures
are paper with permanent marker.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Well, he doesn't address specifically what would happen if it was,
you know, if the papers were written in permanent marker,
but he does sort of address it a bit.
Speaker 8 (35:49):
You've got this piece of paper that would be completely
impregnated with fat, and I don't know if you've ever
dropped olive oil and a piece of paper or just
smeared it in butter, it will become translucent, So you
might not get the crest or the seal or whatever
is you're looking for, and you probably will not get
the type, but you might though it'd be worth giving
(36:12):
out a try.
Speaker 4 (36:13):
Oh well, yeah, oh yeah, we're totally doing that. The
question would be whether it's reasonably likely that you could
recover any readable material is a result of trying to
retrieve any paper from the fat burgs. And it sounds
from doctor Love like that's probably not likely to be
the case.
Speaker 5 (36:33):
Let's just state the obvious.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Doctor Love knows, his knows, his fat bergs knows what
would happen if if some papers were lodged inside a
fat burg, and if there was any chance of retrieving it.
Speaker 4 (36:47):
Okay, so Heather learned there were a fair number of
backups near the White House in the Trump years, and
even some sinkholes it could be caused by jammed up pikes.
Sean learned that maybe, just maybe, if presidential paper made
their way into a fatburg in the DC sewers, maybe
something might have survived in it. If you're a law
enforcement officer interested in making sure presidential records aren't being
(37:10):
wrongly disposed, it may be worth asking a few follow
up questions, and that brings us back to our original question,
the one we sued over. We wanted to know if
the FBI and DOJ had ever investigated whether presidential records
had been sent down the toilet, and if so, what
they learned. Remember, the FBI said they couldn't confirm or
(37:33):
deny the presence of an investigation the old Glomar response.
It took literal years, but finally in February twenty twenty five,
a judge responded, Jason obviously couldn't contain himself and called
me to talk about it.
Speaker 5 (37:47):
Incredible opinion. It's awesome.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
This is the kind of stuff that we need to
get from judges all the time.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
If you want to know whether the FBI ever investigated
the flushing of presidential records down a White House toilet,
we're going to know the answer to that question, probably
pretty soon. So what the Court is saying is that
the FBI can't withhold records based on interference with an
ongoing investigation unless there really could be a prosecution at
the end of that And because the Supreme Court ruled
(38:17):
that acts undertaken by a president while in office in
connection with their broadly defined presidential duties, are immune from prosecution.
The FBI can't show that this is something that would
ever be prosecuted.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Let me just also add one thing just to I
kind of bring it into the now. Effectively, these criminal
investigations against Trump, and but now that Trump is president
this year there is an investigation into the investigation by
Congress over what they say was a politically motivated investigation.
(38:53):
So to me, there's so much more of a public
interest in these documents because now the investigators are being investigated.
Speaker 4 (39:02):
The point is, now that's an open question, and I
think anytime you get into like a public interest analysis,
it's to determine whether the agency is doing its job
properly or not. And so when you have all these people,
including the president, saying that these agencies have been engaged
in illegal weaponization on politicization, well you would think then
(39:23):
that they would have investigated him for the toilet records, right,
And if they didn't, this would actually tell you quite
a bit about that question.
Speaker 9 (39:31):
And how did they go about.
Speaker 4 (39:32):
That investigation, Like did they do it fairly and objectively
or was it a bogus investigation? Well, how do you
tell that, Well, let's look at what they actually did. Right, So,
like we've seen this in some other cases as well,
we're going to see more and more traction on that argument.
I think it's like, Okay, you're saying that the thing
is weaponized and politicized.
Speaker 5 (39:48):
So now things that.
Speaker 4 (39:49):
Maybe in the past you wouldn't be able to get
released because it was just sort of like way too
speculative or there really wasn't that much public interest in it, Well,
now there's a significant public interest in it, right.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
That's you.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
That's your professional opinion. My professional opinion is, let's go.
This is to me one example of us shipping away
at that culture of secrecy and the judge and the
judge agreed.
Speaker 5 (40:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (40:18):
So it's good to see an instance like this where
the court is really like doing the proper independent review
and concluding that there's no basis to deny from the public.
Speaker 9 (40:27):
Knowing even whether there had been any.
Speaker 4 (40:29):
Investigation into the flushing of documents down the White House toilet,
which is as.
Speaker 5 (40:33):
Far as we've gotten so far.
Speaker 4 (40:35):
Now they're going to go they're going to see if
there are any records, so we will at least know
and if there aren't any, then that's the.
Speaker 9 (40:41):
End of the line on that.
Speaker 4 (40:43):
And if there are, then you know that they can
attempt to serve some exceptions and they could potentially assert
Trump's privacyal though I would take that case.
Speaker 9 (40:53):
All day long.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
So at this point, then what will the FBI I
be forced to do?
Speaker 4 (41:02):
The parties are directed to submit jointly to status report
proposing a schedule to govern future proceedings to conclude this
case expeditiously. So they're at a point where they now
need to do what they should have done all along,
which is gather the records, conduct a reasonable search, review
the records, produce everything that's not exempt, and they can
withhold whatever they believe is exempt and think they can
(41:24):
prove his exempt. You know, she's being clear she wants
us to be done expeditiously, so we can put the
pedal to the metal on like, hey, FBI, you need
to process this quickly.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Right on victory victory and the am I love it, well, Matt,
that is our journey, our investigation into not just the
destruction of presidential records. But you know what happens when
these records go down the toilet in the White House.
I get all circumstantial, you know, plausible.
Speaker 4 (41:51):
I think those are very important findings and I think
is really important to democracy. I mean, there's an obligation
to retain presidential records. So I think what I would
want to convey to people is that you and I
take the role of documents and transparency in our democracy
so seriously that we were willing to exhaust the possibility
(42:12):
that somebody's got to go spelunking in a fatberg to
try to extract presidential records so that the public could
have access to them. And I think that is what
will one day save our failing devirus.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
I'm applauding a Matt Well said, thank you, said I
would like you to close out by saying, you know,
you rest your case.
Speaker 4 (42:32):
It was that your honor. I rest my case in
the People Versus White House toilet from Bloomberg and No Smiling,
This is disclosure. The show is hosted by Matt Topik
and me Jason Leopold. It's produced by Heather Schroering and
Sean Cannon for No Smiling. Our editor for Bloomberg is
(42:55):
Jeff Grocott. Our executive producers for Bloomberg our Sage Bauman
and me Jason Leopold, and our executive producers for No
Smiling are Sean Cannon, Heather Schrowing and Matt Topic. The
disclosure theme song is by Nick with additional music by
Nick An Epidemic sound sound design and mixing is by
(43:16):
Sean Cannon. Special thanks to Mark, David Corley, John Alexander Leeper,
and Jake Skinner. For more transparency news and important document dumps,
you can subscribe to my Weeklyfoya Files newsletter at Bloomberg
dot com slash Foya Files.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
That's Foia Files. To get every episode early on Apple podcasts.
Become a Bloomberg dot com subscriber today. Check out our
special intro offer right now at Bloomberg dot com Slash
podcast offer, or click the link in the show notes.
You'll also unlock deep reporting data and analysis from reporters
(43:52):
around the world.
Speaker 4 (43:53):
We'll see you again next Tuesday.
Hey, Matt, Hey, Jason, do you remember what we were
doing back in the summer of twenty twenty two. It
had to do with Donald Trump and some pretty unusual
allegations of document removal at the White House. Here, I'll
give you a hint.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
His staff used to periodically find wands of printed paper
clogging the White House toilets.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Hit it.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
I'm investigative journalist Jason Leopold. I spend most of my
days getting documents from the government.
Speaker 4 (00:29):
I'm attorney Matt Tapic, and I fight them in court
to open their files when they don't want to.
Speaker 5 (00:34):
From Bloomberg and no smiling.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
This is Disclosure, a podcast about buying loose government secrets,
the Freedom of Information Act, and the unexpected places that
takes us. The toilets. Matt, I can't believe we're still
talking about the toilets.
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Well, we never stopped talking about somebody allegedly flushing documents
down the toilet during Donald Trump's first term. Trump is
back in office. The toilets are more important than ever.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
And God, Matt, what a journey, What a perfect records journey.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
It started with the Zoom call back in August twenty
twenty two.
Speaker 6 (01:11):
Hang on I'm just searching YouTube.
Speaker 4 (01:14):
For toilet noises.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Our producers Sean and Heather were there for toilet noises.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Okay, we should estimate how many presidents records have fit
inside the toilet.
Speaker 5 (01:24):
We should, Matt, I mean, this is a big deal.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Presidents are supposed to save everything, yes, by law, and
if they're going down the toilet, then they're not going
to the National Archives like.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
They're supposed to exactly. This news cycle has moved so quickly,
and it wasn't just about the toilets.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Some Trump officials put select documents in so called burn bags,
where they were destroyed rather than preserved.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Former President Trump improperly took classified and even top secret
documents to his Mara Algo residents in Florida.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Again, these are allegations. Great, and then what happens.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Maggie Haberman, a New York Times reporter, tweets a picture
of a toilet that she got from a Trump White
House source. We now have pictures of Trump's toilet with
the flushed documents.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
I urge people to zoom in. You can see it's
a sharpie.
Speaker 6 (02:13):
You can see it's his handwriting.
Speaker 7 (02:15):
Describe that photo, Matt, Well, it's a toilet and I'm
looking down into the bowl and down at the bottom
is some ripped up pieces of paper with some all
camps sharpie.
Speaker 5 (02:26):
Writing on it.
Speaker 7 (02:27):
According to a source, this is a White House toilet.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
But here's the thing that's like bizarre to me, Like,
let's just think about this photo. Right in Siri, somebody
probably threw many pieces of paper in the toilet bowl,
flushed it, and not everything went through right. They didn't
just throw it in the toilet bowl and then walk away.
They absolutely flushed it.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
If you're one of these people who's taping back together
the ripped up things and you come across the presidential
record lying in the toilet, and you have a duty
to preserve it, I guess you don't put antendident, right,
So the picture is the preservation of the record that like,
that picture should end up in the National Archives.
Speaker 5 (03:07):
Oh, that will end up in the National Archives. Absolutely,
it's a presidential record. It may in the toilet.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
I mean it's got his handwriting on it.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
That absolutely ends up and the presidential ogurn.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
So now all this stuff Trump said before about toilet
capacity being too small.
Speaker 8 (03:23):
People are flushing toilets ten times, fifteen times, so EPA
is looking at that very strongly, at my suggestion.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
Seeks showers and toilets, toilets, toilets.
Speaker 9 (03:34):
We won't talk about toilets, toilets, toilets.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
And what goes with a sink of a shower.
Speaker 5 (03:40):
It all makes just perfect sense.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
But Matt, what happened next hours after that toilet picture
emerged more big news drop.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
FBI has executed an unprecedented search warrant at President Donald
Trump's mar A Lago estate.
Speaker 10 (03:55):
We know the Justice Department has an active investigation into
the former president.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
The age of FBI agents on mar Alago supposedly related
to all the records that were taken.
Speaker 7 (04:05):
So you got to wonder how many public records have
gone down the toilets, what happened to them?
Speaker 5 (04:10):
Where did they go?
Speaker 7 (04:11):
Did anyone go looking exactly?
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I was like light bulb, got a FOI of that.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
So I blanketed all these agencies, Apartment, Homeland Security, Secret Service, FBI, CIA,
and SA POJ so basically everybody.
Speaker 11 (04:28):
But what kind of records did you ask for?
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Records about either flushing certain documents down the toilet or
just records of that were brought to mar A Lago
and sort of looking for any kind of communications or discussions,
budget records, how many people that they get there to
try to piece things back together. So it was a
very broad request to all these different agencies, and I
(04:49):
got a response from the FBI, and FBI responded with
what's known as a glomar. They said that they can
either confirm nor deny you know that these records exist, yes,
because to do so would be tantamount to acknowledging the
existence or non existence of an investigation. So that was
like the first clue that the FBI was investigating this.
(05:12):
I reached out to Matt and I said, Hey, I
want to file some lawsuits. Matt kindly agreed to that,
and we suit all of the agencies that I followed
requests with five separate lawsuits for all of these records
related to bringing documents tomorrow lago.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
So these are for records were moved from the White
House that would cover allegations of documents flushed, hauled out
in bags or getting taken to mar a lago. Right,
So when we file a suit in the complaint, if
it gets linked somewhere or it's like embedded in an
opening paragraph, that's the only thing you're going to see,
so we try to make that kind of plungey. So
(05:48):
this one says, playing if Jason Leopold brings his Freedom
of Information Act suit to force defendants Federal Bureau of
Investigation and he was proudor of Justice to produce documents
about any presidential records luting classified records, it were removed
from the White House to borrow lago or flush down
White House toilets, potentially in violation of federal law.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
So we file the lawsuits and then we wait and
we wait.
Speaker 7 (06:13):
But says you couldn't help yourself. I know you didn't
stop there.
Speaker 5 (06:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
I had this amazing source. She worked in the government,
and she.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Told me that when the news was surfacing about destroying
records and flushing down the toilet, she gave me this
great insight, and she told me to hit up GSA,
the General Service Administration, and the National Park Service because
the toilet in the Oval office is sort of overseen
(06:43):
by the White House Usher's office. If that guests clog
or they need to have someone come out and repair it,
that comes from like usually GSA.
Speaker 5 (06:52):
So anyway, I'm just looking at it now.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Was a perfect request met all records of clumbing calls
for former President Trump's residents bathroom toilet and the toilet
next to the Oval Office, and notes and reports related
to those health all records of plumbing repairs and fixture
replacement invoices, contracts, photographs. Because if you're sticking paper in
the toilet, I mean you would think.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
I would get clogged. I filed this request.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
What I thought was like, oh, this is such a
good request, they must have records. I ended up getting
this response from GSA, and it says, mister Leopold, thank
you for taking the time to speak for me today.
For issues like a clogged toilet in the Oval Office,
it is the Usher's Office, which is part of the
Executive Office of the President, which would be the ones
to handle that type of issue. GSA would potentially have
(07:38):
records related to the larger repairs of the toilet in
the White House, but the Usher's Office is the one
that conducts the maintenance in the White House residents and
therefore would not have records related to any restrooms in
that part of the building.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
So I didn't get any records.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
But I had no idea about this.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
I feel like I got this amazing education on the
White House toilet, which I think is a really important
thing to have.
Speaker 4 (08:02):
Right now, you're saying, if it just needs to be plunged,
then the usher's office deals with it. It's a presidential
record exactly, So that's a dead end.
Speaker 12 (08:13):
You can't foil those yet. The Presidential Records Act, that's
the law that governs presidential records which are outside SCOPEFOYA
makes you wait five years before anything is available, And personally,
I think this is ridiculous. The president has an incredible.
Speaker 5 (08:29):
Amount of power.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
We should be allowed to monitor the president and hold
the president accountable just as much or even much more
than federal agencies. And then if it's bigger, if it's
big enough, if it's like this is so bad it's
in the pipes, they got to come out and roday.
Speaker 5 (08:45):
I then it's a GSA.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
So if it didn't flush enough to make.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Make a GSAH, they had no records, man, So that's
it right, Hold on a second, we might be on
our own figure this out. So I just went down
some rabbit holes with our producers, Heather and Sean. Not
everything you flush causes trouble immediately, So we wondered if
you flush a lot of papers and they get past
(09:09):
the White House itself. Could there be some sort of sign.
Speaker 6 (09:14):
Honestly, the reality of there being actual sewage problems because
of this is it could check out because there were
these big sinkholes both at the White House and on
mar A Lago's lawn, and the theory was that it
really to sewage lines.
Speaker 5 (09:32):
Oh my god, wait, is there like stories about this.
Speaker 6 (09:36):
I'm reading a Forbes article in twenty eighteen that talks
about these sinkholes, the sinkhole in the White House lawn,
and it says, almost precisely a year ago, a massive
sinkhole appeared in the front of the Marra A Lago resort.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Hold On, hold on, hold on? Is this a pattern?
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Who knowse we got to look into this, all right,
So we went on a little bit of a journey
here trying to get more details about whether it was
even possible for something like flushing papers to cause a sinkhole.
And Sean might be on a watch list now thanks
to a post he made in the Washington DC subreddit.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
I just got a terrifying comment on Reddit.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
A lot of people in this sub or government workers
with security clearances, and this very odd and very specific
question about the White House sewage system will set off
people's suspicious radar.
Speaker 6 (10:28):
Jun's day off Reddit.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
I'm deleting it right now. I'm hitting delete. I don't
want the FBI showing up at my door. Are you
the toilet bomber?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Did you delete it?
Speaker 6 (10:36):
Because now I think it's even more suspicious.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
I thought that the moment after I hit delete.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Too, okay, But then Matt, we finally finally hit pay dirt.
Speaker 7 (10:48):
Ye.
Speaker 10 (10:48):
Imagine like going going to Harvard or Stanford and getting
you know, this law degree and becoming a page and
going to the White House and somebody.
Speaker 9 (10:55):
Handing you a plunger.
Speaker 5 (10:57):
This is Patrick Arner.
Speaker 10 (10:58):
I mean, it's my living so I mean I'm out
shying away from it.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
But come on, He's what you might call a celebrity
presidential plumbing expert. He became a media darling during the
pandemic and even talk to other media outlets about, well,
this subject, exactly what would happen if someone at the
White House flushed documents down the toilet?
Speaker 5 (11:18):
First, we wanted to.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Know what happens when you flush paper down the toilet.
Speaker 5 (11:22):
In general, it's.
Speaker 9 (11:23):
Going to depend on what kind of paper we're talking about.
Speaker 10 (11:25):
I mean, you can't flush down baby wipes down a
toilet without it becoming a major issue. If you start
using you know, printer, paper, card stuck anything like that,
you know you're going to have pretty severe issues pretty soon.
It's going to be pretty apparent pretty quickly.
Speaker 4 (11:43):
Well, I guess the question remains, will the papers go
down the toilet? In a normal situation, It'll.
Speaker 10 (11:48):
Go down the toilet more than likely, but it probably
won't make it past the trap of the toilet.
Speaker 9 (11:54):
And if you look on the side of a toilet
you kind of see like an.
Speaker 10 (11:56):
S shape, that's your trap. But especially if you're looking
at I guess something that's called a pressure assistant toilet,
which you would find in a lot of commercial applications, you.
Speaker 9 (12:05):
Know, very nice houses. Those will absolutely do it.
Speaker 10 (12:07):
In fact, you go to Home People or Low's tomorrow,
you'll see toilet that are advertise that you can flush
pulballs down.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
Impressive. God bless America.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
I love this guy Patrick because he's so serious about
the work that he does. Let's see what he has
to say about what might happen if the Oval office
toilets are able to flesh a pool ball and the
papers make it down into the pipes of the White House.
Speaker 10 (12:31):
It depends on what type of piping we're gonna have
on the sewer. Originally there was probably piping that was
made out of logs, literally logs. Odds are right now
it's PBC, which is standard. It's where you have what
I have, what most people have.
Speaker 9 (12:46):
Odds are.
Speaker 10 (12:47):
What's happening is it's getting flushed down and it would
make it a ways down the line until it either
you know, comes to a belly in the line where
the line actually dips and SAgs a little bit, or
maybe it possibly makes a bend.
Speaker 9 (13:01):
In essence, what will end up happening is it'll almost
form like a small net.
Speaker 10 (13:04):
It only needs to catch a small a small part
of a bend or you know, a fitting that's jutting
out slightly, and then it now creates a net and
it just starts grabbing waste, foreign objects like paper, feminine projects,
anything like that.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Incredible, okay, And you would think, first of all, it's
the president, he has a super secret toilet. No, this
underscore is that the president is just like every other person.
It's you know, it's it's just a regular toilet. PVC piping,
I'm one of you. I mean, basically, what Patrick is
saying is that if you flush these foreign objects down
(13:41):
the toilet, it's it's sort of going to create a
traffic jam. Right, What could that lead to?
Speaker 10 (13:45):
If there is that belly, if there is a bend,
if there's a weak spot in line, you actually have
a strong potential of too much pressure building up and
forcing a separation and the line. If a line is weak,
if it's cast iron piping, which is possible, it could.
Speaker 9 (14:04):
Be deteriorating already.
Speaker 10 (14:06):
So you start having all these objects, you know, start
piling up, piling up, and all this pressure starts backing up.
Eventually something's gonna give you did see, They're going to
back up the way it came, or it's going to
burst the pipe.
Speaker 5 (14:17):
Oh wow, I know.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
Right, Okay, So just to recap, here's where we are
with the baber's in the toilet. Let's say they've cleared
the toilet, they've gone through, they've cleared the white house.
Now they're out of the yard, and they hit a
bend in the pipes. There's this big backup and now
the pipe's ruptured, right, yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker 9 (14:39):
And then you have two things that'll happen.
Speaker 10 (14:41):
Either sewage can start to seep up out of the
ground depending on how deep the pipe is, or it
can start settling underneath the pipe and starting to spread
out and start actually eroding the soil and the dirt
and all the compaction.
Speaker 9 (14:55):
That you have in that area. This isn't just a theory.
Speaker 10 (14:59):
This is actually a pretty prevalent issue something at insurance
companies look for. In fact, there's been major issues in Chicago,
major issues in San Francisco where sewage lines. First, the
compaction's not properly done if maybe it wasn't a grade,
and that soil in that dirt starts to erode, and
then sinkholes can the potentially start to fill.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
Matt sinkholes, sink holes, sinkholes.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
In May of twenty eighteen, there was a sinkhole on
the White House lawn and it was spreading and.
Speaker 5 (15:29):
There's more of that.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
We gave Patrick a photo of the White House sinkhole
to get his take on it.
Speaker 10 (15:35):
I can't definitively say and I gotta say that, but
if you look at it, it's not just forming, you know.
Speaker 9 (15:41):
A perfect oval or a perfect circle.
Speaker 10 (15:43):
It almost looks linear where it's starting to slope downwards.
And when you have sewage piping, you have something called grade.
You have to have a certain amount of grade when
it comes to sewer pipes because it's all gravity fed.
The waste must slowly roll downhill. That looks like a
going linear and it looks like it's going downhill towards
a road which would probably tie into a city sewer
(16:07):
or potentially tie into a city sewer.
Speaker 5 (16:09):
Okay, so, Matt, so this is my theory.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
This is you know, I see the reports about sinkholes
over the years, including sinkhole at Mora Lago, and you
know pictures of toilet with papers with Trump's handwriting on it.
I'm not stating definitively here that papers going down the
toilet created that sinkhole in twenty eighteen, but that sinkhole
was a big deal in twenty eighteen. And now Patrick
(16:34):
tells us that one way in which that can happen
is by flushing papers down the toilet. Come on, man,
what do you think about that? That's that's serious? Yeah,
I mean we got to get Patrick. We we neat
Patrick as an expert witness to testify in our Foya
case to get people down there.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
There's no foil. I mean, there isn't. This is the problem.
The problem is there isn't a foyer case. At the
end of the day, the problem is you, the American public,
according to our laws, don't have a right to know
whether the president flushed records down the toilet. You don't
get to know that. And you also don't get to
know whether, if that happened, he caused a sinkhole. Therein
(17:14):
lies the problem. Jason Toy is great on a lot
of things, but when it comes to presidential records, there's
a gaping hole.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Well okay, fair, fair, But what do you think about
the fact that he's saying that you know that this
could cause a sinkhole, and that there actually was a
sinkhole on the White House long.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
I mean, we have some solid, circumstantial evidence that there
was regular flushing of papers down the toilet that led
to a sinkhole.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
I just want to note this was in twenty eighteen, right, Yeah,
but there was also another sinkhole in twenty nineteen, another
one in twenty nineteen, there was another one, and in
addition to that, there was also a sinkhole at Mara
a Lago in twenty seventy. Oh well, so, Matt, we've
made it all the way to the White House lawn
(18:03):
and we think that document flushing could have caused the sinkhole.
But remember there was another part of this document journey.
There's a chance that documents made it through the White
House pipes and out.
Speaker 5 (18:14):
Into DC's being a smull sewer.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
System, and we're going to get into that on the
other side of the break, Heather, I want to go
on a sewer tour.
Speaker 6 (18:26):
You really want to go on a sewer tour. So
with all this talk of sinkholes and allegedly flushing stuff
down the White House toilet, I thought it might be
interesting to see if there had ever been any major
obstructions in the sewer near the White House. So I
made a request with DC Water for reports and investigative
(18:48):
records regarding quote, large obstructions caused by a buildup of
non biodegradable solids in the DC sewers that DC Water
dealt with from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty three. That
time frame captured the entire Trip administration and the Biden administration,
or at least what we had had of it so far,
(19:08):
and it took a few months, but finally I got
more than nine hundred pages of material in three different
data sets, which was a lot.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (19:16):
So to see what happened where I built something? Can
I get a drum roll?
Speaker 5 (19:28):
Double bass, drum roll? Whoa what? So you made this?
I made this?
Speaker 4 (19:33):
Okay, you got skills.
Speaker 7 (19:34):
Wow?
Speaker 6 (19:35):
I love maps. Does someone want to describe what they're seeing?
Speaker 4 (19:38):
Well, yeah, this is Dcwater Reports twenty sixteen to twenty
twenty three, and there's a green DAT for the White House,
so it looks like it's about I don't know, a
couple square miles worth. And then there's a bunch of
different colored dats that are kind of scattered all around,
like dupot circle, logan circle, Chinatown. And there's red dots
(20:01):
and red squares, in blue dots, in dark blue dots.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So these are all sewer obstructions reported near the White House.
Speaker 6 (20:08):
Yes, that was a perfect explanation, all of these dots.
There are different markers on the screen here, and the
different colors are for the different terms. So red means
that Trump was an office, and light blue means Biden
was an office, and dark blue actually represents Obama's final
year in office because I had just a little bit
(20:29):
of data from there. One thing to note here, all
the addresses were actually redacted, so unless it's an intersection here,
these dots are not exact. They're more like block numbers.
What I was able to.
Speaker 4 (20:40):
Do so they gave you to like to the eight
hundred black or the twelve hundred black exactly.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
So if you go over to the folders where it
says Obama, Trump, Biden, you can turn off Obama, you
can turn off Biden, you can turn off Trump, you know,
so you can isolate each of these groups here looking
at all, what I noticed is that most of the
incidents in the immediate vicinity of the White House are red.
Speaker 5 (21:10):
And who likes wearing red ties.
Speaker 6 (21:13):
Let me just say how this breaks down. We have
four years of incidents from Trump and roughly for from
non Trump administrations. I made a second request to get
the rest of the Biden years, but as you know,
it sometimes takes a long time to get records back.
Speaker 8 (21:25):
Right.
Speaker 6 (21:26):
But if we're just looking at incidents within a block
of the White House grounds, then there are thirteen within
a block during the Trump years versus two from Biden
and two from Obama. So I just wondered, is it
even possible for someone, say in the Oval office, to
(21:49):
cause trouble for their neighbors of their flushing stuff down
the toilet that's not supposed to be flushed. So I
called up our friend Patrick Garner again, and here's what
he had to say.
Speaker 10 (22:01):
Yes, one hundred percent, especially if they're on a combined
which you've eliminated that they are.
Speaker 6 (22:05):
What he means there is a combined sewer system, which
basically means that to save money, these cities built the
same pipes for the storm water and for waste to
travel through instead of separate pipes, where as the storm
water and the waste would have their own tubes. And
most of the sewer system in this area, specifically around
(22:28):
the White House, is on a combined sewer system. So
all of the dots that you're seeing on this map
are in the combined sewer system, which means that they
share the same roadways essentially, So if there's a blockage
from one address, it's definitely causing issues upstream.
Speaker 9 (22:47):
Think of it as a slide and a bunch of
kids are going down. You've blocked that slide.
Speaker 13 (22:51):
Everybody that's trying to get into that slide is now
backed up and they're going to be affected.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
That is such a great visual, although can I just
say that the children on the slide and my visual
are giant pieces.
Speaker 6 (23:03):
Of Okay, So one thing we don't know is exactly
which direction those pipes flow from the White House, or
even what the pipes are like now, and you can
imagine why the government would want to keep that a
bit of a secret. But I did do a ton
of research on this and I found some really useful
information thanks to a few nerds who really love tunnels.
(23:23):
I found this article from nineteen thirty four where this
reporter does a sewer tour whoa, and he traveled through
all the tunnels, which are so crazy.
Speaker 4 (23:31):
This is when I'm glad I'm the lawyer and not
the reporter.
Speaker 5 (23:35):
Have fun, buddy.
Speaker 6 (23:36):
I found this really old map from the eighteen nineties
that actually did have some pretty comprehensive information about the
pipes coming out of the White House, down to the
size of the pipes and everything, but it's super old.
And then I found this better map from the nineteen eighties,
and I actually sent some friends on an expedition to
the Library of Congress to retrieve it and take some
(23:57):
pictures of it. It shows some pipes sort of snaking
through that park just south of the White House. So
I can't be certain, but what I do know is
that the main pumping station that takes all of the
sewage to the treatment plant is southeast of the White House.
And this stuff is all way more complicated, especially when
it rains, but it at least shows a path the
(24:17):
sewage could travel.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
So where did we leave off with Patrick?
Speaker 6 (24:21):
Okay? So one of my questions to him was, like,
if hypothetically somebody at the White House who's putting stuff
down the toilet is causing trouble for their neighbors, how
far like are we talking like a block or two
blocks or further?
Speaker 13 (24:34):
So you would have to put down a great deal
to be affecting anything past like a block or two,
to be honest with you, But you could flush something
at the White House, allegedly whatever, and cross pass like
three addresses and nobody has an issue, and you're carrying
the same waste, and now you're at an address that
has to be part of my friend's cast Iron or
(24:55):
Orangeburg or something, and now their pipes are becoming more narrow,
so even if if that bypasses a couple of addresses,
it could still very much be of issue somewhere else.
Speaker 9 (25:05):
Water and waste travels. It can be very, very very deceptive.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
So for example, if it was say a couple of
White House documents and like a couple of big mac rappers,
and he did that all at once, that could do it.
Speaker 6 (25:19):
So in my follow up call with Patrick, he actually
had a question.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
For me out of curiosity.
Speaker 13 (25:25):
Did you see if those dates are corresponded with any
current events around that time.
Speaker 6 (25:31):
Any major events from the Trump administration?
Speaker 5 (25:34):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Interesting, good sleuthing, Patrick and Heather.
Speaker 6 (25:38):
Well, I did look into this, and here's what I found.
The first one is May eleven, twenty seventeen, and that's
a twentieth Street and G Street Northwest. Does anybody remember
what happened in May twenty seventeen?
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Me think, Let me think, Robert Maler, keep going. Muller
was appointed special counsel.
Speaker 6 (25:57):
So on May ninth, twenty seventeen, FBI Director James Comy
was fired.
Speaker 4 (26:03):
Oh, Comy was fired, and then two days later there's
this event. Oh so it just as problem obstructed caused, grease, remedy, decreaser.
Speaker 6 (26:14):
So not a ton of information there, obviously.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
But if you wanted to get rid of documents, that
would be a good time, right.
Speaker 6 (26:20):
I mean, what we do know is that there was
an obstruction and it's almost on the same block as
the White House one two three blocks to the west.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
At that time, and we would have to check the
economies in the toilet.
Speaker 5 (26:34):
No pun intended that These.
Speaker 6 (26:36):
Next two incidents from July twenty eighteen, they're both on
the same block, which is the eight hundred block of
Connecticut Avenue, just north of the White House North Lawn.
And both of these incidents happened both before and after
Trump's meeting with Putin at the helsy Key Summit. There
are a few more of these incidents, but listen, this
(26:59):
is all obviously circumstantial.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
It's all a circumstance, Yes, sir, I think this should
call pa circumstantial.
Speaker 6 (27:06):
Not to be a lawyer or anything, but guess it
is interesting that these incidents are super close to the
White House. And I did ask Patrick about that, and
you know, he basically was like, based off of what
you're showing, just that there's a huge increase of events
around the White House and then a big drop off
during the next president's term, Like, it's not crazy to
(27:27):
think that people putting stuff down the toilet is causing
a bunch of trouble for their neighbors. And that's his
professional opinion as a plumber. I mean, listen, this doesn't
prove anything. The flow path may not be what we expect,
but it's plausible to think that it does flow in
some of the areas that we're seeing on this map here. Okay,
case closed, no case open, Matt, case open. But this
(27:54):
is also just the power of the FOYA is that
you can get all of this information in a bunch
of different ways, and I was able to visualize it
in some way totally.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
So we have an idea that there may have been
some instructions.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Right, So Sean, our producer, wondered if there might be
a way to actually retrieve those documents after they'd been flushed, since,
after all, these are presidential records and the law does
require that they be preserved.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
All right, I want to interject for a second, because
there's a thing called a fat bird. I don't know
if you guys are familiar with this phrase. No, Well,
it's essentially where a bunch of sewage kind of congeals
into a giant mass in the sewers. My point is
there is a chance that some intrepid splunkers could find
(28:45):
these documents in the sewage system somewhere, if you can
get to it.
Speaker 9 (28:51):
All right, let's play that out a little bit.
Speaker 5 (28:53):
That's amazing. By the way, where.
Speaker 9 (28:55):
Does the White House flushings?
Speaker 5 (28:58):
Where do they go?
Speaker 4 (28:59):
They go into the city of DC's like sanitary system.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
That's by the way, guys, I truly think this is
a great story and would like to pitch it like this.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
This feels like, I don't know, a Nicholas Cage movie.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
My question, Jason, then, is, if we can figure it out,
are you willing to fly to d C with us,
put on some very very tall waiters and go looking
for these fat birds?
Speaker 9 (29:24):
Well, let me just ask this, what would we find fatbirds?
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Yes, giant giant masses of waste, potentially with the paper
still in it.
Speaker 5 (29:34):
Yeah, but what the paper are disintegrated by?
Speaker 10 (29:37):
Now?
Speaker 4 (29:37):
Okay, Jason, please tell me we found some sort of
answer at least would the paper be there?
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Well, we asked our pal Patrick about fat bergs.
Speaker 10 (29:47):
That's a disgusting and also very interesting theory and probably
also a metaphor for our time right now.
Speaker 7 (29:52):
But I don't know.
Speaker 9 (29:53):
I mean, it's theoretically possible.
Speaker 10 (29:55):
I don't know if it would be legible or anything,
because at that point everything would be and jealing together.
Speaker 9 (30:01):
Who knows. I mean, that's something that's gonna haunt my
dreams tonight.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
So not the answer we were looking for from Patrick.
But we did find someone with a little more direct
knowledge about fat birds, and you'll hear from him after
the break. Believe it or not, Matt, we have an
expert on fat burgs. I want to say, ranow to
expert who also has one of the greatest names I've
(30:29):
come across in a while.
Speaker 5 (30:30):
Are you ready? Yeah? His name is doctor Love.
Speaker 4 (30:35):
I'm sorry wait wait wait wait wait wait his name
is doctor Love.
Speaker 5 (30:39):
His name is doctor Love.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
I'm calling doctor Love.
Speaker 4 (30:42):
Go to doctor Love, the Doctor of Love.
Speaker 5 (30:45):
Do you have to pay for that?
Speaker 4 (30:46):
Can we please get Gene Simmons on the pod to
talk about Gene Simmons would probably have some really interesting
things to say about this.
Speaker 5 (30:52):
Yeah, I'll bet he would.
Speaker 8 (30:54):
I'm John Love. I'm the professor of synthetibology at the
Universe of Exeter. The main focus of my work is
reprogramming bacteria for the development of biofuels to replace the
fuels and the chemicals that come from petroleum.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Doctor Love's work studying biomass brought him into contact with
a pretty big fat burg in England. In fact, it
was about the size of three school buses. Local authorities
sent out an email to a bunch of folks asking
if anyone wanted to do some research on it.
Speaker 8 (31:26):
Really, I thought, gosh, everybody will be wanting a piece
of this, but it turned out I was the only one.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
I think I already see where this is going, which
is that one day, potentially my car could be running
on biofuel. It was made from presidential records that were
flushed down the White House toilet, right.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
Sure, I guess my car as well.
Speaker 11 (31:45):
And it was super super interesting because we needed to
get samples of the thing. And really, these chaps, they're
wearing their clothes, and then on top of that they've
got like a wetsuit or a biohazard suit essentially, and
on top of that they have like a spilunking suit
with they've got respirators and everything, and then they're because
(32:07):
it's almost like as unwieldy as a space, so they're
they're winged in this manhole. Then they have to use
these high powered lances to degrade the fats, so just
sort of and then get chunks from it.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
Get some chunks from it too much?
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Oh yeah, Matt, do you want to do you want
to know what a fatburg looks like?
Speaker 4 (32:30):
It does a hard pass? My friend, I am I
am completely disinterested in the graphic details of what a
fatburg looks like. I mean, I can't stop you.
Speaker 8 (32:39):
It's not flappy or floppy, but it is crystalline, so
it's friable. But it's a bit like have you ever
touched talcum powder?
Speaker 7 (32:49):
Rock?
Speaker 4 (32:50):
No, get out of here, come on.
Speaker 5 (32:53):
And then, Matt, there's this smell.
Speaker 9 (32:55):
It smells awful.
Speaker 4 (32:56):
Are we are what are you read the jerky boys here?
What are we doing with the smell of the fat burg?
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Okay, well we can tie it back to the documents.
Here's Sean bringing in it all full circle with doctor Love.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
One material that we're interested in is just paper, like
everyday stationary, particularly if it's fancier stationary that you might
find and say like an official government office.
Speaker 8 (33:25):
Yeah, are you thinking about Donald trumps stuff and his papers?
Speaker 10 (33:29):
Down?
Speaker 9 (33:29):
The toilet.
Speaker 4 (33:30):
That he's a quick one, Doctor Love. That's good.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
So now that we know a little bit more about
fat burgs, and now that doctor Love knows about why
we're asking, let's figure out whether or not papers would
disintegrate in this hypothetical document flesh fat burg.
Speaker 8 (33:45):
Well, if it were covered in fat, it wouldn't necessarily
degreat because now it's an aerobic for a star, so
there's no oxygen. The paper is made of sell of
those which by its nature is actually quite difficult to
digest anyway. This is why it takes a whole season
for leaves, for example, to just form mulch. So in
(34:08):
these particular conditions, it probably could happen that you might
find the paper.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
That is remarkable. That would mean then that if presidential
records were flushed down the toilet and formed the fat bird,
they would remain intact sufficient that they would still have
their documentary value. Right like you could you could you
could remove it from the fat burg and read it
(34:35):
is what it sounds like?
Speaker 1 (34:36):
The answer is not, well, yes to an extent, because
doctor Love also describes, like what would happen if when
you pulled it out, what it would look like.
Speaker 8 (34:46):
If you're looking for a legible piece of paper. That
might be harder because I don't know what would happen
to the end. For example, I know that, for instance,
this is my calendar and it's from a jet a
jet printer, and if I get this wet, it just
all smears and doesn't really work out very well. So
(35:07):
that's part of the problem. So you might find, you know,
a nice piece of paper with officers of the President of
the United States written on it, for example, but just
a blur or smear. So I don't know if you'd
be able to find a document that would be legible,
but maybe you have.
Speaker 11 (35:25):
It's almost like we're getting into to the X files
at this point.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
Please tell me. We ask him about permanent marker, because
it looks like, I mean, the picture the Haberman pictures
are paper with permanent marker.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Well, he doesn't address specifically what would happen if it was,
you know, if the papers were written in permanent marker,
but he does sort of address it a bit.
Speaker 8 (35:49):
You've got this piece of paper that would be completely
impregnated with fat, and I don't know if you've ever
dropped olive oil and a piece of paper or just
smeared it in butter, it will become translucent, So you
might not get the crest or the seal or whatever
is you're looking for, and you probably will not get
the type, but you might though it'd be worth giving
(36:12):
out a try.
Speaker 4 (36:13):
Oh well, yeah, oh yeah, we're totally doing that. The
question would be whether it's reasonably likely that you could
recover any readable material is a result of trying to
retrieve any paper from the fat burgs. And it sounds
from doctor Love like that's probably not likely to be
the case.
Speaker 5 (36:33):
Let's just state the obvious.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Doctor Love knows, his knows, his fat bergs knows what
would happen if if some papers were lodged inside a
fat burg, and if there was any chance of retrieving it.
Speaker 4 (36:47):
Okay, so Heather learned there were a fair number of
backups near the White House in the Trump years, and
even some sinkholes it could be caused by jammed up pikes.
Sean learned that maybe, just maybe, if presidential paper made
their way into a fatburg in the DC sewers, maybe
something might have survived in it. If you're a law
enforcement officer interested in making sure presidential records aren't being
(37:10):
wrongly disposed, it may be worth asking a few follow
up questions, and that brings us back to our original question,
the one we sued over. We wanted to know if
the FBI and DOJ had ever investigated whether presidential records
had been sent down the toilet, and if so, what
they learned. Remember, the FBI said they couldn't confirm or
(37:33):
deny the presence of an investigation the old Glomar response.
It took literal years, but finally in February twenty twenty five,
a judge responded, Jason obviously couldn't contain himself and called
me to talk about it.
Speaker 5 (37:47):
Incredible opinion. It's awesome.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
This is the kind of stuff that we need to
get from judges all the time.
Speaker 4 (37:54):
If you want to know whether the FBI ever investigated
the flushing of presidential records down a White House toilet,
we're going to know the answer to that question, probably
pretty soon. So what the Court is saying is that
the FBI can't withhold records based on interference with an
ongoing investigation unless there really could be a prosecution at
the end of that And because the Supreme Court ruled
(38:17):
that acts undertaken by a president while in office in
connection with their broadly defined presidential duties, are immune from prosecution.
The FBI can't show that this is something that would
ever be prosecuted.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Let me just also add one thing just to I
kind of bring it into the now. Effectively, these criminal
investigations against Trump, and but now that Trump is president
this year there is an investigation into the investigation by
Congress over what they say was a politically motivated investigation.
(38:53):
So to me, there's so much more of a public
interest in these documents because now the investigators are being investigated.
Speaker 4 (39:02):
The point is, now that's an open question, and I
think anytime you get into like a public interest analysis,
it's to determine whether the agency is doing its job
properly or not. And so when you have all these people,
including the president, saying that these agencies have been engaged
in illegal weaponization on politicization, well you would think then
(39:23):
that they would have investigated him for the toilet records, right,
And if they didn't, this would actually tell you quite
a bit about that question.
Speaker 9 (39:31):
And how did they go about.
Speaker 4 (39:32):
That investigation, Like did they do it fairly and objectively
or was it a bogus investigation? Well, how do you
tell that, Well, let's look at what they actually did. Right, So,
like we've seen this in some other cases as well,
we're going to see more and more traction on that argument.
I think it's like, Okay, you're saying that the thing
is weaponized and politicized.
Speaker 5 (39:48):
So now things that.
Speaker 4 (39:49):
Maybe in the past you wouldn't be able to get
released because it was just sort of like way too
speculative or there really wasn't that much public interest in it, Well,
now there's a significant public interest in it, right.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
That's you.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
That's your professional opinion. My professional opinion is, let's go.
This is to me one example of us shipping away
at that culture of secrecy and the judge and the
judge agreed.
Speaker 5 (40:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (40:18):
So it's good to see an instance like this where
the court is really like doing the proper independent review
and concluding that there's no basis to deny from the public.
Speaker 9 (40:27):
Knowing even whether there had been any.
Speaker 4 (40:29):
Investigation into the flushing of documents down the White House toilet,
which is as.
Speaker 5 (40:33):
Far as we've gotten so far.
Speaker 4 (40:35):
Now they're going to go they're going to see if
there are any records, so we will at least know
and if there aren't any, then that's the.
Speaker 9 (40:41):
End of the line on that.
Speaker 4 (40:43):
And if there are, then you know that they can
attempt to serve some exceptions and they could potentially assert
Trump's privacyal though I would take that case.
Speaker 9 (40:53):
All day long.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
So at this point, then what will the FBI I
be forced to do?
Speaker 4 (41:02):
The parties are directed to submit jointly to status report
proposing a schedule to govern future proceedings to conclude this
case expeditiously. So they're at a point where they now
need to do what they should have done all along,
which is gather the records, conduct a reasonable search, review
the records, produce everything that's not exempt, and they can
withhold whatever they believe is exempt and think they can
(41:24):
prove his exempt. You know, she's being clear she wants
us to be done expeditiously, so we can put the
pedal to the metal on like, hey, FBI, you need
to process this quickly.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Right on victory victory and the am I love it, well, Matt,
that is our journey, our investigation into not just the
destruction of presidential records. But you know what happens when
these records go down the toilet in the White House.
I get all circumstantial, you know, plausible.
Speaker 4 (41:51):
I think those are very important findings and I think
is really important to democracy. I mean, there's an obligation
to retain presidential records. So I think what I would
want to convey to people is that you and I
take the role of documents and transparency in our democracy
so seriously that we were willing to exhaust the possibility
(42:12):
that somebody's got to go spelunking in a fatberg to
try to extract presidential records so that the public could
have access to them. And I think that is what
will one day save our failing devirus.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
I'm applauding a Matt Well said, thank you, said I
would like you to close out by saying, you know,
you rest your case.
Speaker 4 (42:32):
It was that your honor. I rest my case in
the People Versus White House toilet from Bloomberg and No Smiling,
This is disclosure. The show is hosted by Matt Topik
and me Jason Leopold. It's produced by Heather Schroering and
Sean Cannon for No Smiling. Our editor for Bloomberg is
(42:55):
Jeff Grocott. Our executive producers for Bloomberg our Sage Bauman
and me Jason Leopold, and our executive producers for No
Smiling are Sean Cannon, Heather Schrowing and Matt Topic. The
disclosure theme song is by Nick with additional music by
Nick An Epidemic sound sound design and mixing is by
(43:16):
Sean Cannon. Special thanks to Mark, David Corley, John Alexander Leeper,
and Jake Skinner. For more transparency news and important document dumps,
you can subscribe to my Weeklyfoya Files newsletter at Bloomberg
dot com slash Foya Files.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
That's Foia Files. To get every episode early on Apple podcasts.
Become a Bloomberg dot com subscriber today. Check out our
special intro offer right now at Bloomberg dot com Slash
podcast offer, or click the link in the show notes.
You'll also unlock deep reporting data and analysis from reporters
(43:52):
around the world.
Speaker 4 (43:53):
We'll see you again next Tuesday.
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