As the title of this article states with Trump’s attemps to bypass the Presidential Records Act (PRA), it is a critical check on presidential corruption which was established after Watergate.
The PRA was established to ensure transparency and prevent the public’s records from being treated as private property.
It mandates two primary requirements:
First, there is preservation. The president and staff must preserve all records created in office, including memos, emails, and text messages. Destruction, shredding, or deletion of these records is strictly prohibited.
Second, there is public ownership. Records belonging to the public, not the individual. Upon leaving office, the president must transfer all records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). This prevents a president from, for example, taking boxes of documents home to store in a bathroom. NARA is then required to make these records public starting five years after the term ends.
But of course, Trump and his cronies will not follow this law. Trumps administration is attempting to invalidate the PRA to prevent “shady dealings” from being exposed once they leave office.
Trump demanded that his Department of Justice, lead by the corrupt Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, to produce a 52-page memo. It was written by Todd Blanche himself. The memo that Trump had Blanche argues that the PRA is unconstitutional because it allegedly infringes on executive powers.
In another attempt to bypass preservation requirements, this administration uses a program called Signal, where the messages sent from within disappear after a period of time. This is a direct violation of the law, as it bypasses preservation requirements, yet Trump decides to break the law anyway.
The PRA has been enacted for the last 50 years, and in that time, only one president, Donald Trump has violated that law. Every past president since the inception of the PRA have preserved all records. But Trump in his infinite wisdom had decided on his first term to take records that he wanted and removed them from the White House. They were traced to the president’s bathroom in his residence in Mar-a-largo.
Trump was in the process of a conviction by Jack Smith for stealing the records in his first term, but the sole fact that Trump was re-elected to his second term mandated that the charges be dropped. Now so he can continue to steal records, he is trying to change the law.
Four years after the records reach the National Archives, they are released to the public. Trump knows that the records that the archives will share will highlight more of his corruption within the White House in his second term, so he will do everything in his power, including to take down the Presidential Records Act is his desire to continue the lack of transparency from his administration.