President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice just gave him the power to destroy his administration’s records if courts don’t intervene, according to a new analysis.
David A. Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote in a new newsletter articlethat an official memo from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. The law was signed after the Nixon administration and requires presidential administrations to preserve documents related to their work and decision-making.
Graham expressed alarm at the OLC’s opinion memo.
“If the opinion stands, it will allow Trump to destroy the records of his administration’s actions, or take records with him at the end of his term,” he wrote. “Combined with alleged violations of PRA in his first term, this could make Trump the most poorly documented president since at least Richard Nixon, and perhaps going back even further. (As my colleague Henry Grabar writes, the actual library part of his planned presidential library is an afterthought at best.)”
“Yet Trump’s habit of making policy without deliberation, and often with stream-of-consciousness speeches and posts on social media, means that his administration is a paradox: simultaneously one of the most transparent and most opaque in American history,” he added.
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