The Trump administration’s sudden announcement that the federal law governing presidential records for the past 48 years is unconstitutional is creating confusion about access to the records of past presidents, including documents that are on the verge of public release.<\/p>\n
wednesday memo<\/a> From the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice, which challengesPresidential Records Act<\/a>Its purpose appears to be to give President Donald Trump legal leeway to destroy White House records from his current term. It also gives him legal backing to refuse to hand over any remaining records to the National Archives and Records Administration when he leaves office in 2029.<\/p>\n However, archives personnel rely on records laws daily to review, redact, and declassify documents and digital records of every president since Ronald Reagan. Since the opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel are generally considered binding throughout the executive branch, the legal framework that archivists have followed for decades is now in doubt.<\/p>\n The Archives’ former litigation director, Jason R. “The OLC’s opinion could potentially open the door for NARA to grapple with how to proceed with opening presidential records from past administrations,” Barron said.<\/p>\n “If the Trump Justice Department takes the position that OLC opinions apply retroactively, we could force NARA to declare that records of past administrations covered by the PRA should always be considered ‘personal’ in nature, and that courts are without jurisdiction to consider lawsuits … for access to those records,” Barron said.<\/p>\n Barron said it could block public access to more than 700 million White House emails and countless other records held by the archives since the law was enacted in 1978.<\/p>\n Spokespeople for the Archives and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n The impact of the Justice Department’s opinion can be felt immediately by historians, scholars, and journalists who regularly access presidential records and request their release.<\/p>\n The opinions came as more than 78,000 pages of records from President Bill Clinton’s administration were set to be opened to the public on Friday. notice<\/a> Sent<\/a> Earlier this year, White House counsel David Warrington and Clinton representative Bruce Lindsay spoke on such matters.<\/p>\n White House records typically begin to be revealed five years after a president leaves office, when the archives begins accepting public requests for them. Because of the backlog and a provision in the law that allows presidents to withhold some sensitive advice for up to 12 years after leaving office, the flow of records often begins to increase rapidly a decade or more after their terms end.<\/p>\n The Clinton-era records set for release this week include details of deliberations on potential federal appeals court nominees, foreign investment review, the Bosnia conflict, lawyer Roy Cohn, businessman Adnan Khashoggi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.<\/p>\n An official at the Clinton Library in Little Rock said those records were made available as planned. An archive web page detailing upcoming records releases is set to make more than a dozen batches of presidential and vice presidential records public in the coming months. The new legal opinion does not make clear whether those openings will go ahead and whether archivists will continue to add new batches for releases.<\/p>\n It is also uncertain whether the Archives will continue to accept requests from the public for presidential records created since the Presidential Records Act was enacted with Reagan’s files nearly half a century ago.<\/p>\n Politico reported last month that the archives received more than 200 requests for White House records from Trump’s first term after the legal window for such requests opened on Jan. 20. The future of those requests now appears uncertain.<\/p>\n So far, Archives management has not distributed internal guidance on how to interpret the OLC memo or how it would affect Archives policies, according to a person familiar with presidential records processing, who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.<\/p>\n Lawyers involved in discussions about the new legal opinion expect a petition challenging it to be filed within a few days. The DOJ’s announcement could also impact pending lawsuits against the agency, including a long-running lawsuit seeking Obama-era records and cases in recent months challenging its handling of records requests from Trump’s first term.<\/p>\n Kelly McClanahan, a lawyer who owned copies of the records Trump took to Mar-a-Lago during his first term and has faced multiple lawsuits over the White House’s handling of several national security-related controversies, said she was angered by the new opinion and fears the administration could begin destroying the records at any time.<\/p>\n McClanahan said, “He can tell them he wants them to shred everything he doesn’t want them to have.” “I will be taking immediate steps to put it before the judge in those cases. This is a gross misrepresentation not only of the law but of the entire concept of separation of powers.”<\/p>\n The 52-page OLC opinion, written by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gasser, immediately drew criticism from various quarters. While such opinions typically interpret Supreme Court precedent, Gasser’s memo clearly declares that a major high court decision involving President Richard Nixon’s record is wrong.<\/p>\n \u201cAn opinion that says on-point #SCOTUS precedent<\/a> It’s natural to raise eyebrows about what is ‘wrong’ about earlier legislation,” John Ellwood wrote<\/a>A prominent debater who defeated President George W. Served on the OLC during the Bush administration.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, historians are outraged at the move, which they say upsets the balance Congress created in 1978, declaring presidential records federal property but allowing a period of confidentiality that ultimately led to public access.<\/p>\n Sarah Weiksel of the American Historical Association said, “The preservation of these records, both present, past, and future, is essential to the democratic processes that depend on proper public scrutiny.”<\/p>\n Weixel also said it was possible that the administration was only focused on giving Trump more flexibility and had not thought about the consequences of abandoning the presidential records law.<\/p>\n “There seems to be an aspect of ‘act now and understand the implications later’,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Trump administration’s sudden announcement that the federal law governing presidential records for the past 48 years is unconstitutional is creating confusion about access to the records of past presidents, including documents that are on the verge of public release. wednesday memo From the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice, which challengesPresidential<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39386,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[6873,931,5545,749,1023,548,15633,1303],"class_list":["post-39385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bible-verse","tag-administrations","tag-challenge","tag-historians","tag-law","tag-records","tag-trump","tag-watergateera","tag-worried"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39385"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39387,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39385\/revisions\/39387"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}