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The admission, contained in recently published documents during a survey in 2017, shed light on what happened after the National Park Service published a social media article comparing crowds to Trump inaugurations. and former President Barack Obama.
Trump claimed that the footage of the event did not coincide with the number of people he saw on the scene. His then press secretary, Sean Spicer, gathered reporters the following night and said, "It was the largest audience to have witnessed a period of inauguration." .
The documents tell the story of Trump's first-day call to the office of then Director of Park Service, Michael Reynolds.
Reynolds told investigators that he spoke with Trump about 9:30 am after the inauguration and that the president "asked him to provide pictures of the inauguration," wrote investigators from the Inspector General's office. Department of the Interior.
Reynolds then relayed the request to several department staff, including an anonymous communications employee, who said that she had been told: "Trump wanted to see the photos that NPS had of the grand opening. ".
The official "said he had the impression that President Trump wanted to see images that seemed to represent more spectators in the crowd," note notes. She said that the photos that the public media had broadcast had wide angles and showed a lot of empty areas, she assumed that the photos requested by the White House needed to be cropped to show more of the crowd at the event, but acknowledged that Reynolds did not ask that. "
Spicer, the White House press officer, also went to the park department, and a staff member said he understood that he had asked NPS to provide photographs in which the inaugural crowd seemed busy.
The request for additional photographs was forwarded to at least two Park Service photographers who had worked at the event. One of them told the investigators that he had arrived at his office about 30 minutes after Trump and Reynolds had spoken, and that he had cropped the photos, including by removing "the bottom of the crowd".
"He said he did it to show that there were more people," the investigators' notes read. "He said that he thought it was what [redacted] wanted him to do it. He said [redacted] did not specifically ask him to crop the photographs to show more crowd. "
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