Democracy, Populism, & Domestic Politics, United States The DOJ Needs to Investigate Trump’s Records Management

The modern rules dictating the proper handling of U.S. government records were born after a high crime. In 1974, President Richard Nixon declared that it was his right to destroy the records made in his White House, including secret recordings of Oval Office meetings. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled otherwise. After that ruling and Nixon’s resignation, Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act to put the Nixon materials in the National Archives, and later the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which made clear that the government—not the private citizens who once worked in the White House—owned all presidential records. ...

We have both had the honor of taking that oath to serve in the executive branch (both of us as part of the Obama administration and one of us—Jon—in the Clinton administration as well). In our first days in office, we went through archival briefings, dry and detailed, and in our last days we knew that the records—good and bad—were not ours to keep and were to be preserved. That experience of working for the government underscored exactly what many Americans who have never walked into a federal building believe intuitively: The president has to follow the same rules as anyone else. This is part of why we were infuriated to learn that former President Donald Trump is reported to have removed unique materials from the White House that later had to be recovered from his Mar-a-Lago resort. And it is why we believe that the Department of Justice must investigate Trump for his handling of government records and, if the facts justify it, prosecute him, just as other less prominent Americans have been for similar behavior.

Read more in The Atlantic >>