Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said employees at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) appear to be in a panic mode to destroy evidence that could become problematic under the incoming Trump administration in an effort to save themselves from being terminated or possibly from facing prosecution.
On Tuesday, the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project found a document and product destruction truck outside of the DOJ’s headquarters in Washington D.C. – just days after the Justice Department reported a “division-wide system outage” that prevented its access to certain network files.
The DOJ’s report of a system outage came in response to Star News Digital Media, Inc., which owns and operates The Tennessee Star, and Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy inviting the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to drop its opposition to the release of the complete written works left by Covenant School killer Audrey Elizabeth Hale before the transition of government to President-elect Donald Trump.
Pappert said if the reports of DOJ employees destroying documents and evidence are true, he jokingly advised the process to be completed “as quickly as possible” if employees do not want to “face the consequences of their actions” over the last four years of the Biden-Harris administration.
“I would advise them to get through this document destruction process as quickly as possible because there are only so many job positions that Marc Elias has at his law firm, and there are only so many positions available at Perkins Coie and these other Democratic firms,” Pappert said on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“So these lawyers who are waiting and very dutifully shredding their documents so they don’t get in trouble after Trump gets in, if they wait until 11:59 a.m. on the 20th of January, they’re going to be waiting in the unemployment line and that just breaks my heart,” Pappert added.
When it comes to Star News Digital Media, Inc. and Leahy’s invite for the FBI to drop its opposition to the release of the Covenant killer documents, Pappert said he believes it would be a “no-brainer” for the DOJ, under the incoming Trump administration, to accept such a request.
“It should be a no-brainer for anybody interested in transparency. This is the government creating an entire hidden secret policy network of how to keep we, the public, in the dark about critical issues, about mass killings that may have an ideological component,” Pappert said.
“So I think Matt Gaetz is going to be the guy to see reason, and I think that if we send that before the transition, I, personally, have to look forward to the heartburn that it’s going to give the Department of Justice and FBI,” Pappert added.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
