White House Staff Probably Violating The Presidential Records Act, And I Probably Don't Care

I almost don't want a record of this... WAKING NIGHTMARE.

White House (by Cezary p via Wikimedia)

White House (by Cezary p via Wikimedia)

The Presidential Records Act governs how the President, the Vice-President, and their staff are supposed to preserve communications. Most of the act is about “ownership” of the documents… because the Act was passed in 1981 and people were still reacting to Richard Nixon. But in terms of preservation, the basic rule is that you’re not supposed to throw away your work. You never know what history (or a special prosecutor) will find interesting.

Trump likely violates this act all the time because he sometimes deletes his tweets. Sorry, let me back up for posterity’s sake: In 2017, the leader of the free world primarily communicates through Twitter, often in the middle of the night when he is cold and lonely and fears that everybody hates him as much as they say they do. Occasionally, he will delete those tweets, though not apparently for spelling errors (because it’s okay for children to know that the president can’t spell).

This deletion of presidential records isn’t limited to Trump. Multiple outlets report that White House staffers use Confide to text each other, and that app deletes the message from its servers after it is read. This is probably a violation of the Presidential Records Act. But the Act doesn’t really define any punishments for violators. Something tells me that the Trump Administration isn’t big on the honor system, so without some kind of clearly defined penalty, I don’t think they care much if they are in violation or not.

And, frankly, neither do I. We live in a post-facts world. Having a “record” of what was said seems entirely pointless, in this universe. Trump’s not accountable for what he says. He’s proven that. What he will say tomorrow will bear no logical relation to what he said today. There are at least 60 million assholes out there who have no problem with that standard. Keeping “records” seems like an American solution in a bizarro-America world.

As to his staff, haven’t we just seen how internal communications can be hacked, stolen, taken out of context, and used by foreign powers interested in destroying our democracy? Didn’t that literally just happen? Put it like this: if what Trump and his people actually say when they know they’re being recorded isn’t enough for you to be horrified, then I don’t think you’re going to be getting anything from their Snapchats. Yes, transparency and accountability are laudable goals, but we are so freaking far away from that, that raising a stink about record preservation seems too small.

When you catch your dog pooping on the couch, it’s somewhat irrelevant to say, “and now I know who pooped in the closet last week.”

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Moreover, and I say this from some experience of dealing with tipsters who wish to remain anonymous, anything that helps these people leak the truth without being caught by their boss is probably a good thing. This White House already leaks like a sieve. I like that, and I hope it continues. If the NSA is sending auto-self-destructed packages to the Washington Post, then I want to make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

Look, somewhere there is a draft executive order authorizing the Department of the Interior to round up gay people and teach their cats to recite Joel Osteen sermons. Should that be preserved as a historical document about the times we live in? Sure. But if they burned every freaking copy, I’d be cool with it.

I almost don’t want a record of this… WAKING NIGHTMARE. For the first time in my life, I understand why Egyptians would scratch out the names of previous rulers etched on their stone monuments. “Let’s never speak of this again” is probably the wrong strategy, long-term, but I get it.

The Trump presidential library will be a house of lies. I’m not going to bend over backwards to make sure that he kept all of his documents.

President Trump’s deleted tweets could violate Presidential Records Act [New York Daily News]

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Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.