A GOVERNMENT photographer admitted to editing official pictures of Donald Trump’s inauguration to make the crowd appear bigger, following intervention from the president himself, according to newly released federal documents.

The US Interior Department records, obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act, confirm that the photographer cropped out empty space “where the crowd ended” after Mr Trump complained to the National Park Service (NPS) that his audience appeared smaller than Barack Obama’s in 2009.

The unearthed records are part of an Interior Department Inspector General investigation into the inauguration ordeal, which became the first fiasco of Mr Trump’s beleaguered presidency when the White House notoriously and inaccurately claimed Mr Trump had attracted the biggest ever inauguration audience.

According to the Guardian, an NPS communications official, whose name was redacted in the released files, told investigators that the acting NPS director, Michael Reynolds, called her after speaking with the president, who wanted pictures from the inauguration.

She told investigators that “she got the impression that President Trump wanted to see pictures that appeared to depict more spectators in the crowd”, and that the images released so far showed “a lot of empty areas”.

The records confirm an early-morning phone call between Mr Trump and Mr Reynolds on 21 January 2017, the day after his inauguration in Washington DC.

The communications official made clear that Mr Reynolds did not specifically ask for the photographs to be cropped but she understood it to be assumed. She then contacted the NPS photographer who had covered the event the day before.

The photographer, whose name was also redacted in the released files, confirmed to investigators that he was contacted by an NPS official who asked for “any photographs that showed the inauguration crowd sizes” and was asked to go back to his office and “edit a few more”.

“He said he edited the inauguration photographs to make them look more symmetrical by cropping out the sky and cropping out the bottom where the crowd ended,” the investigators reported, according to Guardian.

“He said he did so to show that there had been more of a crowd.”

A second official from the NPS public affairs department then told investigators that Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary at the time, called her office on the morning of 21 January and asked for pictures that “accurately represented the inauguration crowd size”.

She told investigators that she also contacted the NPS photographer to ask for additional shots, with the understanding that Mr Spicer was after NPS “to provide photographs in which it appeared the inauguration crowd filled the majority of the space in the photograph”.

Later that day, Mr Spicer began his now notorious press briefing at the White House in which he falsely claimed: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period.”

However, it was not clear from the records which photographs were edited and whether they were released publicly.