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Records Administration conferred with
the White House to establish rules for
record-keeping, and, given the novelty
of Trump’s favored form of communi-
cation, advised Trump to save all his
tweets, including deleted ones. Trump
hasn’t stopped deleting his tweets; in-
stead, the White House set up a sys-
tem to capture them, before they van-
ish. On February 22nd, the White House
counsel Don McGahn sent a memo on
the subject of Presidential Records Act
Obligations to everyone working in the
Executive Office of the President, with
detailed instructions about how to save
and synch e-mail. McGahn’s memo also
included instructions about texting apps:You should not use instant messaging sys-
tems, social networks, or other internet-based
means of electronic communication to conduct
official business without the approval of the
Office of the White House Counsel. If you
ever generate or receive Presidential records
on such platforms, you must preserve them by
sending them to your EOP email account via
a screenshot or other means. After preserving
the communications, you must delete them
from the non-EOP platform.It appears that plenty of people in
the White House ignored McGahn’s
memo. Ivanka Trump used a personal
e-mail for official communications. Jared
Kushner used WhatsApp to commu-
nicate with the Saudi crown prince. The
press secretary Sean Spicer held a meet-
ing to warn staff not to use encrypted
texting apps, though his chief concern
appears to have been that White House
personnel were using these apps to leak
information to the press.
Ethically, if not legally, what records
must be preserved by the White House
and deposited with the National Ar-
chives at the close of Trump’s Presidency
is subject to more dictates than those
of the Presidential Records Act. In 2016,
the International Council on Archives,
founded with support from UNESCO in
1948, published a working document
called “Basic Principles on the Role of
Archivists and Records Managers in
Support of Human Rights.” Essentially
an archivists’ elaboration of the princi-
ples of the 1948 Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, it urges governments
to preserve archives that contain evi-
dence of violation of human rights.
The rules about record-keeping, like
so much about American government,gued against executive privilege. But, in
the second Bush Presidency, Kavanaugh
favored executive privilege. Executive
Order No. 13,233, Further Implementa-
tion of the Presidential Records Act, tried
to extend executive privilege, in effect,
indefinitely. Specifically, it granted to the
current President the right to review the
declassification of the records of his pre-
decessors before their release to the pub-
lic: “Concurrent with or after the former
President’s review of the records, the in-
cumbent President or his designee may
also review the records in question, or
may utilize whatever other procedures
the incumbent President deems appro-
priate to decide whether to concur in the
former President’s decision to request
withholding of or authorize access to the
records.” This, of course, allowed Bush
to withhold from public view anything
in his father’s papers that he did not wish
to see enter the public record, including
documents drafted by members of his
own Administration who had served in
his father’s Administration or in the Rea-
gan Administration. As the archivist
Bruce Montgomery observed, “In brief,
the Bush order expanded executive priv-
ilege beyond the incumbent president to
past presidents, their heirs, and even to
vice presidents, seemingly in perpetuity.”
Historians got angry. At a forum co-
sponsored by the PEN American Cen-
ter, Lyndon Johnson’s biographer Rob-
ert Caro pointed out, “If you want to
challenge the executive order, the histo-
rian must ask for specific, detailed things.
The Johnson Library has thirty-four
million pieces of paper. Unless you’ve
been through it, you can’t possibly know
what’s in there.” This raises another del-
icate point. An archive that holds every-
thing is useless unless you can find your
way around it, and that requires money.
The entire budget of the National Ar-
chives is about the cost of a single C-17
military-transport plane. In 2018, when
Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the
Supreme Court, the National Archives,
with its limited resources, processed
twenty thousand pages of documents
relating to his service in the indepen-
dent counsel’s office during the Clinton
Administration but was unable to get
through all the requested documents
from his work in the Bush Administra-
tion in time for the Senate to review
them. In any case, Kavanaugh’s collec-
tion was vast: his records included more
than six hundred thousand e-mails alone.
Barack Obama revoked Executive
Order No. 13,233 on his second day in
office. His Administration settled a suit
filed by the National Security Archive
against the Bush Administration, for
its failure to release visitor logs. Obama’s
White House published the logs of
more than six million visitors, includ-
ing the head of the National Security
Archive. (Shaking his hand, Obama
said, “You know, there’s gonna be a re-
cord of this.”) His Administration did
not require corporate-style N.D.A.s.
Nor had any President until Trump. I
asked Don Wilson what he expected
of the Trump papers, and he said, “What
kind of record will we have other than
what he dictates will be a record?”T
he archivist of the United States,
David Ferriero, has copies of three
letters that he wrote, as a kid in the nine-
teen-sixties, framed on his office wall.
One is to Eisenhower, asking for a pho-
tograph. The second is to John F. Ken-
nedy, inquiring about the Peace Corps.
The third is to Johnson: “Mr. President,
I wish to congratulate you and our coun-
try for passing John F. Kennedy’s Civil
Rights Bill.” The originals of those let-
ters ended up in the National Archives,
preserved, long before the passage of
the Presidential Records Act.
Ferriero, an Obama appointee, says
that the P.R.A. operates, essentially, as
an honor system. He wishes that it had
teeth. Instead, it’s all gums. Kel McCla-nahan, a national-security lawyer, told
me, “If the President wanted to, he could
pull together all of the pieces of paper
that he has in his office and have a bon-
fire with them. He doesn’t view the ar-
chivist as an impediment to anything,
because the archivist is not an impedi-
ment to anything.”
After Trump’s Inauguration, in Jan-
uary, 2017, the National Archives and