GoKawiilIn this Justice Department handout photo, stacks of boxes can be observed in a bathroom and shower in the Mar-a-Lago Club’s Lake Room at former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Photo: U.S. Department of Justice via Getty Images
Lauren Harper is Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy.
President Donald Trump recently threatened genocide as political leverage on social media, which begs the question whether there are even more extreme conversations happening in private in the Oval Office, or if anyone in Trump’s orbit is cautioning him against this immoral threat of mass violence.
Access to these discussions is critical not only for accountability, but also for future administrations who want to re-engage in rational diplomacy. That’s why the Department of Justice’s recent opinion that grants Trump, and every president who follows him, a license to steal American history is so dangerous.
In a sweeping new memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel, the DOJ claims the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. The department’s edict, which is already facing legal challenges, argues that a president’s records are private, rather than public, property. This is an extreme reinterpretation of executive power that seeks to undo nearly 50 years of transparency.
The PRA was signed into law after the abuses of the Watergate era and established that the records of every president since Ronald Reagan are public property and must be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, at the end of a president’s term.
This law is the reason the public has insight into the inner workings of everything from President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and the George W. Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina to records on the nomination of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, and other Supreme Court nominees.
That’s because the PRA states that, starting five years after the end of a presidential administration, those records become subject to public release under the Freedom of Information Act.
This history-killer memo attempts to undo this route for public access to presidential records and build a brick wall where there once was a window into the highest office in the land.
In this DOJ photo, boxes of records spill over at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump was indicted in 2023 for his handling of classified documents. Photo: U.S. Department of Justice via Getty Images
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