Earlier this spring, the Trump administration declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional and ordered White House staff to ignore certain parts of the law. That move immediately endangered Americans’ access to hundreds of millions of records about the administration’s actions and decisions, which are essential to understand what is happening behind the scenes.
We've written about our court battles surrounding the PRA before, but for this week’s newsletter we want to take a step back to talk about what the law is, why it's important, and what we're doing to defend it.
The PRA was enacted in 1978 after the Watergate scandal. It established that presidential records are the property of the American people, not any one president, and created guidelines to ensure they are properly preserved and publicly accessible. Under the law, presidential records become eligible for public release five years after the end of a presidential term. That means that documents from Trump’s first term could be eligible for release now.
But in April, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued a sweeping memorandum that declared the PRA is unconstitutional and that Trump “need not further comply” with its requirements. Before this, no presidential administration — including Trump’s first — had challenged the PRA’s constitutionality in such a manner. Legal experts and historians have warned that OLC’s interpretation of the PRA could block public access to hundreds of millions of records that could provide additional details on corruption, conflicts of interest, and abuses of power.
We’re fighting back. In April, we filed a lawsuit, alongside the American Historical Association, challenging the OLC memo. We also asked the court to take immediate action to block the Trump administration from disregarding the PRA. In May, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued an emergency order directing the administration to comply in full with the PRA. The government plans to appeal.
We’re also fighting for the release of a wide range of presidential records from Trump’s first term that we requested before the administration announced its intent to ignore the PRA. Those documents — including communications by senior leadership like Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump — could shed light on the first Trump administration’s potential conflicts of interest, improper influences, or use of nonofficial channels to conduct government business.
Learn more about why the PRA is important and how we’re continuing to fight to ensure Trump’s presidential records are not lost to history.
