SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: Trump could legally destroy all documents from his presidency before leaving the White House.

https://x.com/cginisty/status/2049869690483122273

cginisty

Translated from French

 Trump's DOJ (Department of Justice) has just declared the Presidential Records Act, passed after Watergate, unconstitutional. Practical outcome: Trump could legally destroy all documents from his presidency before leaving the White House.

The man who was indicted for keeping classified documents at home has just gotten the law scrapped that would have forced him to turn them over.

A quick historical reminder...

 As the Watergate scandal erupts, Nixon tries to derail the investigation and cover it up. He starts destroying evidence, but it's precisely the discovery of the recording tapes and his attempts to conceal them that lead to his resignation. America learns a lesson: never again should a president be able to erase the traces of his time in power.

In 1978, Congress passes the Presidential Records Act.

This law transfers legal ownership of presidential archives from the private domain to the public domain. Emails (formerly letters), phone calls, memos, meeting notes, exchanges with advisors—everything produced in the exercise of presidential power belongs to the American people, not the President. Every president has been subject to it for 48 years. Without exception.

 That was without reckoning with the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel, which has just issued an opinion declaring the Presidential Records Act simply unconstitutional and "unrelated to any valid and identifiable legislative objective."

The DOJ is now telling Trump that he "no longer has to comply" with the law that would require him to turn over his archives to the National Archives upon leaving the White House.

The day after this opinion was published, White House legal advisor David Warrington issued new directives for all White House staff on document preservation, replacing the existing protocols of the Presidential Records Act with an internal policy whose outlines remain deliberately vague.

 If this policy is confirmed, the archives of this presidency could legally be destroyed before Trump leaves the White House. Decisions on the war in Iran—who decided what, when, based on what intelligence. Communications with Netanyahu during the February briefing that preceded the strikes, exchanges with MBS on Saudi investments in the family crypto, arms contracts, discussions on the ballroom, correspondence on lawsuits against the media, texts on financial markets in the minutes before presidential announcements—all of that could vanish.

Legally. Deliberately. Permanently.

Thirteen Democratic senators led by Adam Schiff (@SenAdamSchiff
) wrote to legal advisor Warrington to warn that the new policy risks allowing the administration to "illegally destroy important documents covered by the Presidential Records Act." The White House responded that "important documents will be preserved."

OK, but this response doesn't say which documents will be preserved or by what criteria. It doesn't say who decides, either. It just says "important documents" and leaves it to the administration to define what's important.

It's the National Archives under attack here—the last institution that could, after Trump's departure, piece together what happened and hold people accountable. Every piece of this setup serves the same function: to make history impossible to write and accountability impossible to pinpoint.

This administration is methodically dismantling the mechanisms of oversight and institutional memory. This presidency doesn't just want to govern without constraints; it wants to govern without memory, so that what was done can never be fully reconstructed, documented... and judged.

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