In this archival photo of January 20, 2017, crowds fill the National Mall in Washington before the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States at the presidential inauguration. (Photo: AP)

A government photographer has published photos of the inauguration of President Donald Trump to make the crowd bigger than it actually was after the president was unhappy with how the event was going. been seen on the pictures, according to the records obtained by The Guardian.

After repeated requests from the White House for new photos, the photographer reframed the areas where there was no one to suggest that the crowd filled the frame, according to The Guardian.. The request was made after Trump – the first day of his term – compared his inaugural public to that of former President Barack Obama and focused on the size of the group.

According to The Guardian, there was an early morning phone call between Trump and Michael Reynolds, then director of the National Park Service. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has also sent repeated calls to NPS to try to get a different set of photos. The appeal to Reynolds in search of more flattering photos and the new set was announced shortly after the inauguration in 2017 by the Washington Post. However, the documents obtained by The Guardianand reported Thursday provide a fresh overview on how the new set of photos came out.

Although no one said they had received the order to crop the photos, the accounts of several people involved in the day seemed to say that they assumed that the new photos needed to be changed.

According to The Guardian, A Parks Department Communications Officer told the investigators that Reynolds had called and ordered other photographs. She said "she felt like President Trump wanted to see images that seemed to represent more spectators in the crowd," because previously published images showed "a lot of empty areas."

The official told investigators that she "assumed" that this meant that the photographs had to be cropped to show a larger crowd size, but that it was not an official request, according to The Guardian. Another official had a similar account after a call from Spicer.

The photographer told the investigators that he had been asked to "retouch some pictures" of the day. He said that he supposed he was supposed to trim the photos but that it was not an official order. He told the investigators that he had cut out the sky and the bottom of the pictures "where the crowd had stopped". According to the Guardian documents, the investigators said that the photographer had "shown that there were more people."

The names of NPS employees have been redacted in the report, according to The Guardian.

After new photos were sent to the White House, Spicer gave the infamous press conference falsely claiming to reporters that he was "the biggest audience to witness an inauguration, end point".

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