slatten49 wrote:
Trump Flouted Rules About Presidential Records. That's Not How It Usually Works.
Michael D. Shear; Wed, August 24, 2022
WASHINGTON — For the three years that former President Barack Obama wrote his 768-page memoir after leaving the White House, the millions of pages of his official presidential records were locked away in warehouses in Washington and Chicago.
Each time Obama wanted to review something, his aides submitted precise requests to the National Archives and Records Administration. Sometimes, documents would be encrypted and loaded onto a laptop that would be brought to Obama at his office in Washington. Other times, a paper document would be placed in a locked bag for his perusal, and later returned the same way.
The tightly restricted process that Obama followed to gain access to the 30 million records from his presidency stands in stark contrast to former President Donald Trump’s seemingly haphazard handling of some of the government’s most sensitive documents after he left office in early 2021. People familiar with the actions of other recent presidents from both parties described similar, library-like procedures to see documents, conforming to rules set out in the Presidential Records Act, which was passed in 1978.
The difference underscores how rare it is for one of the country’s recent presidents to flout the rules about presidential records. And it helps to put into a broader context the FBI’s decision to search Trump’s estate in Florida after concluding that the former president had taken thousands of documents, including some that were classified as top secret.
Aides to Trump have recounted his chaotic last days in the White House in 2021, as the president and some of his allies tried in vain to cling to power. They said boxes of documents were frantically assembled in the dining room outside the Oval Office and in Trump’s personal residence in the main White House building, even as the country reeled from the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
Much of the presidential archive is transferred digitally, which makes it all the more striking that Trump appears to have taken so many paper documents. Historians and White House officials described a methodical process used by presidential staff members to keep track of who produces digital documents so that they can be archived.
People who work in the White House are generally required to use phones and laptops issued by the administration, to make archiving easier. And work performed on personal or home computers must be printed out or forwarded so that it can be cataloged and sent to the archives when the president leaves.
It is unclear how many of the last-minute boxes that Trump and his aides packed up were turned over to the archives. But according to federal officials, dozens of boxes of documents ended up in the former president’s custody.
That is not the way it’s supposed to happen.
“At 12:01 on Jan. 20, those documents become property of the United States government,” said Lee White, executive director of the National Coalition for History.
People familiar with the departures of Obama, a Democrat, and former Presidents George W. Bush, a Republican, and Bill Clinton, a Democrat, said the process of identifying presidential records and sending them to the archives begins months, if not years, before a president leaves the White House for the final time at noon Jan. 20.
In Obama’s case, the process involved the transfer of millions of digital files from White House systems to the archives. That began months before the president ended his second term, and was done without the direct involvement of Obama, according to a person familiar with the procedures.
According to the archives, “the Obama Presidential Library has the largest set of electronic holdings in the presidential library system, with approximately 250 terabytes of data including approximately 300 million email messages.”
Obama’s office near Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood has a secure facility for making calls and reviewing classified documents. But aides to Obama said he did not request to see any classified documents while writing his book.
“As required by the PRA, former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the presidential records of his administration,” the National Archives and Records Administration said in a statement this month, referring to the Presidential Records Act.
Bush, who left office in 2009, also delivered millions of documents to the archives. People familiar with the transfer of that information said it happened on a regular basis throughout the president’s two terms. One person recalled that any documents deemed protected by the Presidential Records Act would be sent every day by the president’s staff secretary to the Office of Records Management, for eventual transfer to the archives.
Even presidents who were not subject to the 1978 records act have historically treated official documents with care. Michael Beschloss, a historian and a longtime board member for the National Archives Foundation, said that Dwight D. Eisenhower kept classified documents at Fort Ritchie, a military installation in Maryland, while he was in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, writing his memoirs. The former president and military commander would have to apply to see the documents, Beschloss said.
After the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate this month, the former president lashed out, and at one point accused Obama of having left office with many classified documents.
“President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified,” Trump said in a statement to the press. “How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!”
That accusation prompted a quick reply from the archives, which refuted Trump’s claim.
The National Archives “assumed exclusive legal and physical custody of Obama presidential records when President Barack Obama left office in 2017, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act,” the statement said, adding that in addition to about 30 million pages of unclassified records, the agency “maintains the classified Obama presidential records in a NARA facility in the Washington, D.C., area.”
The archives’ authority over presidential records dates to the beginning of the Reagan administration, the result of a Watergate-era backlash over attempts by former President Richard M. Nixon to maintain control over millions of pages of papers and hundreds of hours of audiotapes that helped force his resignation.
Nixon initially reached a deal with President Gerald R. Ford that would have given him control over his papers, the ability to take them to his post-presidential retreat in California and — most controversially — the ability to destroy or modify them as he wished.
But an act passed by Congress after Nixon left office in August 1974 forced him to take his fight to court. He eventually lost at the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision.
The legal tug of war over Nixon’s documents led to the passage of the Presidential Records Act. President Jimmy Carter signed the act into law, and it went into effect on the first day of Ronald Reagan’s term in 1981.
“At the time that Nixon went to California, these rules were at best somewhat ambiguous, and the country was relying on the patriotism of a president, as with Eisenhower, following these rules,” Beschloss said. “What Nixon showed the country was that you couldn’t rely on that goodwill.”
The current case involving Trump is another test of the power of the presidency. His office has said he had a “standing order” that materials removed from the Oval Office and taken to the White House residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them, although none of the three potential crimes cited in the FBI search warrant depends on whether removed documents are classified.
National security experts also reject the idea of a standing declassification order, saying that even a presidential directive to remove a document’s classification must follow a rigorous process.
Trump has accused the FBI and the Justice Department of exceeding their authority and of going beyond what the law requires. But the history of the past 40 years suggests that it is Trump whose handling of his presidential documents is out of the norm.
“In the same way Nixon thought the White House tapes were his,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, “he just fails to understand that you are a servant in the White House, that you don’t own the materials produced there.”
Trump Flouted Rules About Presidential Records. Th... (
show quote)
https://nypost.com/2022/08/14/theres-no-sainthood-for-obama-national-archives-in-trump-fbi-raid-uproar/Accusations are flying fast and furious regarding last week’s FBI raid at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. In my Wednesday piece for The Post, I noted that 30 million pages of Obama administration records had been trucked to Chicago. The Obama Foundation, working with the National Archives, promised to digitize and put them online. Almost six years after the records arrived at a Chicago-area warehouse, that hasn’t happened.
Trump revved up the controversy Friday when he asserted that President Barack Obama “kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified. How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!”
Trump has not revealed any source for his allegations that many of the papers were classified and that they had “lots” of “nuclear” material. The Obama Foundation and the National Archives have denied there are any classified documents in those records. {How would they know otherwise-did they check all 30-33 million documents?}
The media have largely sainted the National Archives in this ruckus. The agency issued a statement Friday: “As required by the [Presidential Records Act], former President Obama has no control over where and how [the archives] stores the Presidential records of his Administration.” {In a Chicago warehouse supposedly}
Almost all the media coverage of this controversy has ignored or downplayed the dismal failure of the Presidential Records Act to reveal presidents’ records. A Washington Post analysis of the dispute on the 30 million pages conceded, “As with many issues of government transparency and document-sharing, it’s true that this is not great! You often have to wait years for requested documents, and this appears to be no exception.”
But journalists should be outraged by this perpetual stonewalling. Barack and Michelle Obama collected a $65 million advance for their memoirs, but Americans are still effectively prohibited from seeing his official records.
The Presidential Records Act requires people seeking information to file a Freedom of Information Act request. As Politico reported in March, “At many presidential libraries, the queues for processing FOIAs stretch for years,” and requests “involving classified information can take more than a decade.”
Obama boasted he had “the most transparent administration in history.” In reality, the Obama administration was as devious as the Nixon administration when it came to government secrecy.
In 2011, Obama’s Justice Department formally proposed to permit federal agencies to falsely claim that FOIA-requested documents did not exist. The American Civil Liberties Union complained that the plan perverted “a law designed to provide public access to government information to be twisted to permit federal law enforcement agencies to actively lie to the American people.”
Obama’s lawyers claimed a new veto power that turned FOIA into a travesty. White House counsel Gregory Craig quietly notified all federal agencies in 2009 that “all documents and records that implicate the White House in any way are said to have ‘White House equities’ and must receive an extra layer of review, not by agency FOIA experts, but by the White House itself,” a congressional report noted. Politico observed in 2016 that in some cases, White House FOIA “referrals have led to years of delay.”
The Obama Foundation and the National Archives talk about digitizing those 30 million pages as if it were an almost unfathomable labor of Hercules. It took me less than five minutes searching online to find a Kodak scanner that can handle 150,000 pages a day. Buy 10 of those scanners, and the 30 million pages could easily be digitized within a month. The scanners cost $20,000 each, but the Obama Foundation has $560 million in assets and the top three employees receive more than $500,000 a year. It could easily find the money for the scanners if disclosure were the goal.
The Obama Foundation estimates that 95% of Obama administration records were “born digital.” They could be easily placed online — if disclosure were the goal. Will the National Archives insist on “reviewing” each page for spelling errors before it goes live on the internet or what?
Obama’s machinations don’t make Trump trustworthy. The Justice Department has not yet revealed precisely what documents it seized at Mar-a-Lago and what legal charges may be filed. There are plenty of questions about the motivation of the FBI raid, the possible role of an FBI confidential informant and the alleged seizure of materials protected by attorney-client privilege
At this point, National Archives bureaucrats seem to have adapted the early motto of National Review, standing “athwart history, yelling Stop.” But as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wisely warned in 2012, “Lack of transparency eats away like a cancer at the trust people should have in their government.”