Our Deep Dive for White House Records Starts in the Toilet

This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. The time is approximately 11.15am about to start a consensual telephone call with Dr. Dawa Sang. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. Hey, you're hot, you're hot, you're hot, boy, you said, I'd never seen that much evidence in my entire career and I don't think we'll ever see that much evidence again. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer no doubt no question of his life. And that's the unicorn. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to the 6th Bureau from Bloomberg Podcasts starting on February 13th on the IHART radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Matt. Hey, Jason. Do you remember what we were doing back in the summer of 2022? Uh, 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. His staff used to periodically find wads of printed paper clogging the White House toilets. Hey, Nate, I'm investigative journalist Jason Leopold. I spend most of my days getting documents from the government. I'm attorney Matt Tapping and I fight them in court to open their files when they don't want to. From Bloomberg and No Smiling, 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. Well, we never stopped talking about somebody allegedly flushing documents down the toilet during Donald Trump's first term. And now the Trump is back in office. The toilets are more important than ever. And God, Matt, what a journey. What a perfect records journey. It started with the Zoom call back in August 2022. Hang on, I'm just searching YouTube for toilet noises. Our producers Sean and Heather were there. For toilet noises. Okay. We should estimate how many present records are fit inside the toilet. We should. Matt, I mean, this is a big deal. The 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 they're supposed to. Exactly. This news cycle has moved so quickly and it wasn't just about the toilets. Some Trump officials put select documents in so-called burn bags where they were destroyed rather than preserved. Former President Trump improperly took classified and even top secret documents to his Mar-a-Lago residents in Florida. Again, these are allegations. Right. And then what happens, Maggie Heyerman, 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. I urge people to zoom in. You can see it's a sharpie. You can see it's his handwriting. 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 caps sharpie writing behind. Cornie knew a source. This is a White House toilet. But here's the thing that's like bizarre to me. Like let's just think about this photo, right? In theory, 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. 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 want to independent it, right? So the picture is the preservation of the record that, like that picture should end up in the National Archives. Oh, that will end up in the National Archives. Absolutely. It's a presidential record. It may be in the toilet. I mean, it's got his handwriting on it. That absolutely ends up in the presidential log. So now all this stuff Trump said before about toilet capacity being too small. People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times. So EPA is looking at that very strongly at my suggestion. Seeks? Showers and toilets. toilets. toilets. We won't talk about toilets. toilets. toilets. And what goes with a sink at a shower? It all makes just perfect sense. But Matt, what happened next? Hours after that toilet picture emerged. More big news drop. FBI has executed an unprecedented search warrant at President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. We know the Justice Department has an active investigation into the former president. You know, a siege of FBI agents on Mar-a-Lago, supposedly related to all the records that were taken. So you got to wonder how many public records have gone down the toilets? What happened to them? Where did they go? Did anyone go looking? Exactly. I was like, light bulb. Got to foyer that. So I blanketed all these agencies, Department of Homeland Security, Secret Service, FBI, CIA, NSA, POJ. So basically everybody. But what kind of records did you ask for? Records about either flushing certain documents down the toilet or just records that were brought to Mar-a-Lago and sort of looking for any kind of communications or discussions, budget records, how many people did they get there to try to piece things back together? It was a very broad request to all these different agencies. And I got a response from the FBI and FBI responded with what's known as a Gologmoor. They said that they can either confirm nor deny that these records exist 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. I reached out to Matt and I said, hey, I want to file some lawsuits that kindly agreed to that. And we sued all of the agencies that I filed a request with, five separate lawsuits for all of these records related to bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago. So these are for records removed from the White House. That would cover allegations of documents flush, talled out in bags or getting taken to Mar-a-Lago. Right. So when we file a suit in the complaint, if it gets leaked somewhere or it's like embedded in the opening paragraph, that's the only thing you're going to see. So we try to make that kind of punchy. So this one says, playing if Jason Leopold brings us freedom of information, exude to force defendants, federal bureau of investigation, and US private representatives to produce documents about any presidential records, including classified records. They were removed from the White House tomorrow, Lago, or flushed down White House toilets potentially in violation of federal law. So we file the lawsuits and then we wait and we wait. But since you couldn't help yourself, I know you didn't stop there. Yeah. I had this amazing source. She worked in the government and she told me that when the news was surfacing about doing our storing records and flushing them down the toilet, she gave me this great insight and she told me to hit up, she has to say the General Service Administration and the National Park Service because the toilet in the Oval Office is sort of overseen by the White House Usher's Office. If that gets clogged or they need to have someone come out and repair it, that comes from like usually GSA. So anyway, I'm just looking at it now. It was a perfect request, Matt. All records of plumbing calls, reform or residence from residents, bathroom, toilet, and the toilet next to the Oval Office. And notes and reports related to those calls. 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 that I would get clogged. I filed this request, what I thought was like, oh, this is such a good requesting, must have records. I ended up getting this response from GSA and it says Mr. 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 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 and the White House residents and therefore would not have records related to any restrooms in that part of the building. So I didn't get any records, but I had no f***ing idea about this. So I feel like I got this like amazing education on the White House toilet, which I think is a really important thing to have right now. You're saying if it just needs to be plunged, then the Usher's Office deals with it's a presidential record. Exactly. So that's a dead end. You can't foie those yet. The Presidential Records Act, that's the law that governs presidential records, which are outsides scope of foie à, makes you wait five years before anything is available. And personally, I think this is ridiculous. The president has an incredible amount of power. We should be allowed to monitor the president and hold the president accountable just as much or even much more than federal agencies. And 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 rob a day. Then it's a GSA. So if we didn't flush enough to make a GSA, they had no records, ma'am. So that's it, right? Hold on a session. We might be on our own to 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 the White House itself, could there be some sort of sign? 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 Mara Lagos lawn. And the theory was that it really just sewage lines. Oh my God, wait, is there like stories about this? I'm reading a Forbes article in 2018 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 Mara Lagos resort. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Is this a pattern? Hanna's. 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. I just got a terrifying comment on Reddit. A lot of people in the 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. Sean, stay off Reddit. 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? Did you delete it because now I think it's even more suspicious? I thought that the moment after I hit delete too. Okay. But then Matt, we finally, finally hit pager. Imagine like going to Harvard or Stanford and getting you know this law degree and becoming a page and going to the White House and somebody handing you a plunger. This is Patrick Carter. I mean, it's my living. So I mean, I'm not shying away from it, but come on. He's what you might call a celebrity presidential plumbing expert. He became a media darling during the pandemic and even talked to other media outlets about, well, this subject exactly. What would happen if someone at the White House flushed documents down the toilet? First, we wanted to know what happens when you flush paper down the toilet in general. It's going to depend on what kind of paper we're talking about. 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 stock, anything like that, you know, you're going to have pretty severe issues pretty soon. It's going to be pretty apparent pretty quickly. Well, I guess the question remains, will the papers go down the toilet in a normal situation? It'll go down the toilet more than likely, but it probably won't make it past the trap of the toilet. And if you look on the side of a toilet, you kind of see like an S shape, that's your trap. But especially if you're looking at like something that's called a pressure assisted toilet, which you would find in a lot of commercial applications, you know, very nice houses, those will absolutely do it. And in fact, you go to home people are low. Tomorrow you'll see toilet fed are advertised that you can flush pool balls down. Impressive. God bless America. 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 at the Oval Office toilets are able to flush a pool ball and the papers make it down into the pipes of the White House. It depends on what type of piping we're going to have on the sewer. Really, there was there was probably piping that was made out of logs literally logs odds are right now it's PVC, which is standard. It's where you have what I have what most people have odds are what's happening is it's getting flushed down and it would make it a waist down the line until it either, you know, comes to a belly in the line where the line actually dips and sacks a little bit or maybe it possibly makes a bend. In essence, what all ended up happening is it'll almost form like a small net and 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 creeds a net and it just starts grabbing waste for an object like paper, feminine projects, anything like that. Incredible. And you would think first of all, it's the present. He has a super secret toilet. No, this underscore is that the president is just like every other person is, you know, it's just a regular toilet PVC piping. I mean, basically what Patrick is saying is that if you flush these foreign objects down the toilet, it's sort of going to create a traffic jam, right? What could that lead to? 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 in the line, if the line is weak, if it's cast iron piping, which is possible, it could be deteriorating already. So you start having all these objects, you know, start piling up, piling up and all this pressure starts backing up. Eventually, something's going to give you see the going to back up the way it came or it's going to burst the pipe. Oh, wow. I know, right? Okay. So just to recap, here's where we are with the papers 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 back up and now the pipes ruptured, right? Yes. Yes, exactly. And then you have two things that'll happen. 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 that you have in that area. This isn't just a theory. This is actually a pretty prevalent issue. Something that insurance companies look for. In fact, there's been major issues in Chicago, major, Schens San Francisco where sewage lines burst. The compaction's not properly done. Maybe it wasn't to grade and that soil and that dirt starts to erode and then sinkholes can potentially start to fill. Matt. So, what's the problem with sinkholes? Sinkholes. Sinkholes. In May of 2018, there was a sinkhole on the White House lawn and it was spreading. And there's more of that. We gave Patrick a photo of the White House sinkhole to get his take on it. I can't definitively say and I gotta say that. But if you look at it, it's not just forming, you know, a perfect oval or a perfect circle. 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 gravely fed. The waste must slowly roll downhill. That looks like it's going linear and it looks like it's going downhill towards a road which would probably tie into a city sewer or potentially tie into a city sewer. Okay. So, Matt, so this is my theory. This is, you know, I see the reports about sinkholes over the years, including sinkhole at Mar-a-Lago and, you know, pictures of toilet with papers with trunks handwriting on it. I'm not stating definitively here that papers going down the toilet created that sinkhole in 2018. But that sinkhole was a big deal in 2018 and now Patrick 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 serious. Yeah. I mean, we got to get patched. We need Patrick as an expert witness to testify in our FOIA case to get people down there. They wanted to do so. I mean, there isn't a, this is the problem. The problem is there isn't a FOIA case. You need to 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 lies the problem, Jason. FOIA is great on a lot of things, but when it comes to presidential records, there's a gaping hole. Well, okay, fair, fair. But what do you think about the fact that he's saying that they're, you know, that this could cause a sinkhole? And that there actually was a sinkhole on the White House long. I mean, we have some, some solid circumstantial evidence that there was regular flushing of papers down the toilet that led to a sinkhole. I just want to note. This was in 2018, right? Yeah. But there was also another sinkhole in 2019, another one in 2019, there was another one. And in addition to that, there was also a sinkhole at Mar-a-Lago in 2017. Oh, well. So Matt, we've made it all the way to the White House long and we think the document flushing could have caused the sinkhole. But remember, there was another part of this document journey. There's a chance the documents made it through the White House pipes and out into DCs being this full sewer system. And we're going to get into that on the other side of the break. Hello, I'm Michelle Hussein. And for more than 20 years, I was at the BBC. But all the time I was delivering the headlines, I wanted to go further than the news of the day to spend more time with the people shaping our world. And that's what I'm doing here on this podcast. Speaking to people from Nigel Farage, to tech journalist Kara Swisher, and the tech industry is running wild, they've gotten what they wanted and they've seen a huge run-up in their stock prices. 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 records regarding, quote, large obstructions caused by a build-up of non-biotic-gradable solids in the DC sewers that DC Water dealt with from 2016 to 2023. That timeframe captured the entire Trump administration and the Biden administration, or at least what we had had of it so far. And it took a few months, but finally I got more than 900 pages of material in three different data sets, which was a lot. So to see what happened where I built something, can I get a drum roll? I'm a musician, don't know, double bass drum roll. Whoa, what the? So you made this? I made this. Okay, you got skills. Wow. I love maps. Does someone want to describe what they're seeing? Well, yeah, this is DC Water Reports 2016 to 2023. And there's a green dot 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 dots that are kind of scattered all around, like, Dupot Circle, Logan Circle, Chinatown. And there's red dots and red squares and blue dots and dark blue dots. So these are all sewer obstructions reported near the White House. Yes, that was a perfect explanation. All of these dots, they're different markers on the screen here. And the different colors are for the different terms. So red means the 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 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 do. So they gave you the 800 block or the 1200 block. Exactly. 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 this, what I noticed is that most of the incidents in the immediate vicinity of the White House are red. And who likes wearing red ties? Let me just say how this breaks down. We have four years of incidents from Trump and roughly four 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. Right. So just looking at incidents within a block of the White House grounds, then there are 13 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 cause trouble for their neighbors if they're 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. Yes, 100%. Especially if they're on a combine, which he've eliminated that they are. What he means there is a combined sewer system, which basically means that to save money, these cities built the same pipes for the stormwater and for waste to travel through instead of separate pipes, whereas the stormwater and the waste would have their own tubes. And most of the sewer system in this area specifically around 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. I think if it does a slide and a bunch of kids are going down, you blocked that slide. That's trying to get into that slide is now backed up and they're going to be affected. That is such a great visual, although can I just say that the children on the slide in my visual are giant pieces 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. I found some really useful information thanks to a few nerds who really love tunnels. I found this article from 1934 where this reporter does a sewer tour. Whoa. And he traveled through all the tunnels, which are so crazy. This is when I'm glad I'm the lawyer and not the reporter. Have fun, buddy. I found this really old map from the 1890s 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 1980s. And I actually sent some friends on an expedition to the Library of Congress to retrieve it and take some 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 sewage could travel. So where did we leave off with Patrick? 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? 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 can 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 orange burger or something. And now their pipes are becoming more narrow. So even if it bypasses a couple of addresses, it could still very much be of issue somewhere else. Water and waste travels. It can be very, very, very deceptive. So for example, if it was say a couple of White House documents and like a couple of big Mac wrappers and you did that all at once, that could do it. So in my follow call with Patrick, he actually had a question for me at a curiosity. Did you see if those dates are corresponded with any current events around that time? Any major events from the Trump administration? Oh, interesting. Good sleuthing Patrick and Heather. Well, I did look into this and here's what I found. The first one is May 11, 2017. And that's a 20th street and G street Northwest. Does anybody remember what happened in May 2017? Let me think. Come and think. Robert Mueller keep going. Mueller was appointed special counsel. So on May 9, 2017 FBI director James Comey was fired. Oh. Comey was fired and then two days later, there's this event. Oh. So it just this problem obstructed cause grease, remedy, degreaser. So not a ton of information there, obviously. But if you wanted to get rid of documents, that would be a good time, right? 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. At that time, and we would have to check the economies and the toilet, no pun intended mat. These next two incidents from July 2018, they're both on the same block, which is the 800 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 Helsinki summit. There are a few more of these incidents, but listen, this is all obviously circumstantial. It's all a circumstance. Yes, Heather, I think this would call it a circumstance. Not to be all lawyer or anything, but yes. It is interesting that these incidents are super close to the White House. And I did ask Patrick about that. And 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 think that people put stuff down the toilet. It's 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 is also just the power of the foyer 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. So we have an idea that there may have been some instructions. 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. All right. So I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. I'm going to start with the question. What are we 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. April 29th and 30th Bloomberg House arrives in Miami at the Formula One Grand Prix. Set against one of the world's most electrifying sporting events, Bloomberg House brings business, investment, and culture together, and is powered by Bloomberg Journalism, real-time data, and forward-looking conversations. From on-stage discussions to exclusive networking with global leaders, this is where ideas connect. Bloomberg House Miami. Learn more at bloomberglive.com slash Bloomberg House Miami. Believe it or not, Matt, we have an expert on fat birds. I want to say we're now to expert who also has one of the greatest names I've come across in a while. Are you ready? Yeah. His name is Dr. Love. I'm sorry. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. His name is Dr. Love. His name is Dr. Love. I'm calling Dr. Love. Dr. Love. Dr. Love. Dr. Love. Do we have to pay for that? 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. Yeah, I bet he would. I'm John Love. I'm the professor of synthetic biology at the University 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. Dr. Love's work studying biomass brought him into contact with a pretty big fat bird 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. Really, I thought, God, everybody will be wanting a piece of this, but it turned out it was the only one. I think I already see where this is going, which is that one day potentially my car could be running on biofuels that was made from presidential records that were flushed on the White Hills toilet. Right? Sure. I guess my car as well. 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 wet suit or a biohazard suit essentially. And then on top of that, they have like a spelunking suit with you've got respirators and everything. And then there, because it's almost like as unwieldy as a spacesuit, so they're waged in this manhole, then they have to use these high powered lenses to degrade the fat, so just sort of and then get chunks from it. Oh, get some chunks from it too much. Oh, yeah. Matt, do you want to, do you want to know what a fat bird looks like? It does a hard past, my friend. I am completely disinterested in the graphic details of what a fat bird looks like. I mean, I can't stop you. It's not flappy or floppy, but it is crystalline, so it's friable, but it is a bit like, have you ever touched Talcompound or rock? No, get out of here. Come on. And then Matt, there's this smell. It smells awful. Are we, are we the, are we the jerky boys here? What are we doing? With the smell of the fat bird? Okay, well, we can tie it back to the documents. Here's Sean bringing it all full circle with Dr. Love. One material that we're interested in is just paper like every day stationery, particularly if it's fancier stationery, that you might find in say like an official government office. Oh, yeah. Are you thinking about Donald Trump's stuff and his papers down the toilet? Dead, he's a click one, Dr. Love. That's good. So now that we know a little bit more about fat birds, and now that Dr. Love knows about why we're asking, let's figure out whether or not papers would disintegrate in this hypothetical document flush fat bird. Well, if it were covered in fat, it wouldn't necessarily degrade because now it's an aerobic for star. So there's no oxygen. The paper is made of cellarose, 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 these particular conditions, it probably could happen that you might find the paper. That is remarkable. That would mean that if presidential records were flushed down the toilet and formed a fat bird, they would remain intact sufficient that they would still have their documentary value. You could remove it from the fat bird and read it is what it sounds like the answer is. Not, well, yes, to an extent, because Dr. Love also describes like what would happen when you pulled it out? What it would look like? If you're looking for a legible piece of paper, that might be harder because I don't know what would happen to the ink, 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 with, it just all smears and doesn't really work out very well. So that's part of the problem. So you might find, you know, a nice piece of paper with Office 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. It's almost like we're getting to the ex files at this point. Well, what, 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. 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. You've got this piece of paper that would be completely impregnated with that. And I don't know if you've ever dropped olive oil in a piece of paper or just smeared it in butter, it would become translucent. So you might not get the crest or the seal or whatever it is you're looking for. And you probably will not get the type, but you might though it'd be worth giving out a try. Oh, hell 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 fambergs. And it sounds from Dr. Love like that's probably not likely to be the case. Let's just state the obvious. Dr. Love knows his, knows his fat bugs, knows what would happen if some papers were lodged inside a fatberg. And if there was any chance of retrieving it. Okay, so Heather learned there were a fair number of backups near the White House in the Trump years. And even some sinkholes that could be caused by jammed up pikes. Sean learned that maybe, just maybe, if presidential papers made their way into a fatberg in the DC sewers, maybe something might have survived in there. If you're a law enforcement officer, interested in making sure presidential records aren't being 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 it if so, what they learned. Remember, the FBI said they couldn't confirm or deny the presence of an investigation. Yo, Glomar response, it took a literal years. But finally, in February, 2025, a judge responded, Jason obviously couldn't contain himself and called me to talk about it. Incredible opinion. It says awesome. This is the kind of stuff that we need to get from judges all the time. If you want to know whether the FBI ever investigated the flushing of presidential records down a White House toilet, we are 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 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. Let me just also add one thing just to like kind of bring it into the now effectively these criminal investigations against Trump end. 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. And so to me, there's so much more of a public interest in these documents because now the investigators are being investigated. 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, well, you would think then 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. And how did they go about 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. So now things that 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. That's your professional opinion. My professional opinion is let's go. This is, to me, one example of us shaping away at that culture of secrecy. Oh, and the judge and the judge agree. Yeah. 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 knowing even whether there had been any investigation into the flushing of documents down the White House toilet, which is as far as we've gotten so far. 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 end of the line on that. And if there are, then, you know, they can attempt to serve some exemptions and they could potentially serve from privacy. Although I would take that case all day long. So at this point, then, what will the FBI be forced to do? 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 conductor reasonable search, review the records, produce everything that's not exempt and they can withhold whatever they believe is exempt and think they can prove is exempt. You know, she's 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 right on victory in 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? Again, all circumstantial, you know, plausible. Yeah, I think those were very important findings and I think it's 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 that somebody's got to go spolunking in a fat bird to try to extract presidential records so that the public could have asked for the right to do it. I think that is what will one day save our failing to buy from applauding Matt. Well said, thank you said you write I would like you to close out by saying you know you rest your case. It was that you're on or 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 Topic and me, Jason Leopold. It's produced by Heather Schrohring and Sean Cannon for No Smiling. Our editor for Bloomberg is Jeff Grootcott. Our executive producers for Bloomberg are Sage Bauman and me, Jason Leopold. And our executive producers for No Smiling are Sean Cannon, Heather Schrohring and Matt Topic. The disclosure of theme song is by Nick with additional music by Nick and Epidemic Sound. Sound design and mixing is by 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 weekly FOIA files newsletter at bloomberg.com slash FOIA files. That's FOIA files. To get every episode early on Apple podcasts, become a bloomberg.com subscriber today. Check out our special intro offer right now at bloomberg.com slash podcast offer or click the link in the show notes. You'll also unlock deep reporting data and analysis from reporters around the world. We'll see you again next Tuesday. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly and now bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend. I'm Christina Raffini. We'll bring you the latest headlines in depth analysis and big interviews. All the stories that hit home on your days off. And I'm Lisa Mateo. Watch and listen to bloomberg this weekend for thoughtful enlightening conversations about business, lifestyle, people and culture. On Saturday mornings, we put the past week's events into context, examining what happened in the markets and the world. That on Sundays we speak with journalists, columnists and key political figures to prepare you for the week ahead. Join us as soon as you wake up and bring us with you wherever your weekend plans take you. Watch us on Bloomberg Television. Listen on Bloomberg Radio. Stream the show live on the Bloomberg Business app or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend. Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7am Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg Television, Radio and wherever you get your podcasts.