What are presidential records? And to whom do they belong?
Every president generates millions of records in the course of leading the country: memos, emails, speeches, notes, Tweets... There are rules for how those records should be treated, both as historical documents, and as public property, enshrined in the Presidential Records Act. What does the Act say, and what does it have to do with how former-President Donald Trump handled government documents after leaving office?
We talk with Trudy Huskamp Peterson, who worked as an archivist for the National Archives for 24 years, including serving as Acting Archivist of the United States from 1993-1995. We also talk with Margaret Kwoka, Professor of Law at Ohio State University and legal expert on information law, government secrecy, and transparency.
Transcript
Archival President Clinton: [00:00:00.56] And I am so sorry about disco. I mean. That whole era of leisure suits and beanbag chairs and lava lamps. I mean, we all had to endure the cheesiness of the 70s, and that was wrong.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:24.43] Hannah, what the heck is this?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:26.05] This is from the Clinton White House Correspondents Dinner in 1998. This is Bill Clinton apologizing for injustices committed in America throughout history, including saying that Pluto isn't a planet and just generally apologizing for pineapple pizza.
Archival President Clinton: [00:00:41.68] Pineapple on pizza. Some things are just wrong.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:48.52] By the way, did you know that an earlier version of this comedy act involved a joke about a spork?
Nick Capodice: [00:00:54.10] A spork? I thought the pineapple pizza joke was bad enough.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:57.58] Well, the joke about the spork, in case you're wondering, was the spork an eating utensil? That's useless as a spoon and is a fork. And for that, I am sorry.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:09.37] Whew.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:10.36] Well, Hannah, why do you even know about a bad joke that Clinton didn't actually ever say in the first place?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:17.89] Well, there's actually a whole lot more where that came from. Millions of pages, in fact, from Clinton's time in the White House, including drafts of speeches he made with notes in the margins and everything. And you as a member of the public can access that in Clinton's official presidential records. And while this presidential record is less serious than, say, Kennedy's briefings on the Cuban Missile Crisis, all of these records for every president are part of a collective history protected under the Presidential Records Act, something we have been hearing about a lot lately.
Archival Audio: [00:01:53.56] Former President Trump facing questions over his mishandling of official records after....Revelations that Donald Trump took 15 boxes of official presidential records and memorabilia to his Mar a Lago resort....Agents were told to look for signs that official records had been altered, destroyed or concealed.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:12.53] This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:14.42] I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:15.32] And today we're talking about presidential records: what they are, how they are supposed to be handled, and whether they have anything to do with the criminal case against President Donald Trump for what he did with a bunch of government documents at the end of his presidency.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:32.06] Now, when we use the term presidential record, what exactly are we talking about?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:37.22] A presidential record, according to the Presidential Records Act of 1978, Is anything created or received by the president or any of their staff in the course of carrying out the duties of office. It also applies to vice presidents and their staff. We're talking memos, briefings, emails, maps and even tweets.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:02:58.52] The obvious presidential record would be a message to Congress. The president's daily briefing by the intelligence services.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:08.09] This is Trudy Huskamp Peterson.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:03:10.19] I'm a certified archivist. I've worked for the US National Archives for over 20 years, and the last two plus years I was the acting archivist of the United States. After that, I've done archival work all over the world.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:25.19] We're talking to Trudy because presidential records are the responsibility of the National Archives, which archives, organizes, and preserves them for the public.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:42.95] But what about personal stuff? What doesn't count as a presidential record?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:47.45] The act does define the difference between personal records and presidential records. The obvious personal records would be the things that have to do with the president's private life.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:03:57.17] If a president has a child in the White House and the child gets a report card and it comes in, that's certainly private. If a president sends a letter to his sister for her birthday, that's probably private.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:11.72] And the act also accounts for anything related to a reelection campaign or the president as a candidate. Sometimes this stuff is considered personal rather than presidential.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:04:21.74] The one that becomes tricky is political material. And the general distinction is something like this. If a president is sending a message to Congress and supporting a bill that is of his party, that is doing political business, but it is doing it in the course of his regular duties. If, on the other hand, president gets in an airplane and the flight is paid for by the political party and he flies here to my home state of Iowa and does a speech on behalf of candidates or on behalf of reelection. That's private. That's political, private business. It is not his constitutional or statutory. Tory duty to fly to Iowa and make a speech on behalf of a candidate.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:15.52] All right. So why have this act in the first place? What is the point of defining what counts as a presidential record versus a personal one?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:23.36] Well, because the Presidential Records Act doesn't just define presidential records. The act also says that those records do not belong to an individual president. They belong to the public. And because they belong to the public, they must be preserved and made accessible to that public. And this is where the National Archives comes in.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:05:47.27] Presidential Records Act says that the records created by the president in the course of his or her constitutional statutory duties are the property of the people of the United States. They are public property, not private property.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:02.39] I mean, it does make sense that the records of the president do not belong to that individual president by virtue of the fact that the presidency is a job serving, you know, it's beholden to and funded by the public. But you said this act didn't exist before 1978. So how do we handle presidential records before that?
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:06:22.47] Well, maybe the way to answer that is to talk a little bit about the history of why we have a presidential records Act. The starting with George Washington. Presidents took their records home with them when they left office at that time. Of course, there was no National Archives. There was no alternative. And so all the way through the 19th century, presidents thought of their papers as their private property and they took some home. By the time we get into the early 20th century, the presidency has grown a lot. And there are a lot of materials, not only papers, but photographs and sound recordings and all kinds of things. And it becomes a real management problem when they leave the presidency. Franklin Roosevelt, under whose administration the National Archives was created, the National Archives Act is 1934, was trying to figure out what to do with all the stuff he was getting. And his aide suggested to him that this new institution, the National Archives, could take care of the materials after his presidency was over. And so this is what happened. The papers of Franklin Roosevelt were given to the National Archives to manage at the president's home in Hyde Park, New York. And so that's the first establishment of a presidential library. What happens after Roosevelt, then, is Truman thinks this is a good idea. And his friends, because he's not wealthy, establish a library at his home in Independence, Missouri, for his material, and it is given to the National Archives to run.
Archival Audio: [00:08:10.37] The library will house 3.5 million documents of the Truman era, including a famous election extra that was somewhat inaccurate.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:19.44] Then President Eisenhower decided to make this an official policy with the Presidential Libraries Act of 1955.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:08:27.72] And at that time, it simply provided that the National Archives, on behalf of the government, could accept a donation of presidential papers still considered private. So it was a donation to the public and could also take a donation of a facility, a building in which to house them and to run them.
Nick Capodice: [00:08:50.10] So former presidents find a way to fund the construction and operation of these libraries themselves. And the National Archives manages what's in them. The records inside.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:00.21] Yeah. And most presidents start making plans with the National Archives before they leave office.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:05.94] All right. So in the 20th century, presidents started setting up private libraries for all their records and donating these records to the National Archives to manage them in those libraries. What happened next?
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:09:18.51] And that's going on all the way up through Nixon.
Archival Audio: [00:09:21.66] Are you sorry you didn't burn the tapes?
Archival Audio: [00:09:24.48] You know, interestingly enough, everybody in Europe that I talked to said, why didn't you burn the tapes? And the answer is I probably should have.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:33.69] The title of this episode is actually "Part 57 in our ongoing series: Because of Nixon."
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:09:39.36] We get to the Nixon administration. And of course, at the end of the administration, Nixon resigned in disgrace. And then it turns out that Nixon is making a deal with a part of the government called the General Services Administration, at which time the National Archives was part and the head of the General Services Administration was Vinylite Nixon. Destroy the famous Nixon tapes. Everybody in the country who was political said, Oh, no. This is a bad idea. So the Congress quickly passed a law that covered the Nixon papers and said, no, we're seizing these for the government.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:21.49] Now, a lot of these records had already been made public because they were seized during the investigation into Watergate. But once Nixon left office, any of his records that were not already in the custody of the federal government were in Nixon's custody.
Nick Capodice: [00:10:37.96] And given how much public interest there was into the whole Watergate scandal and Nixon's famously sketchy track record of destroying or hiding records, that might hurt his reputation, I can see, Hannah, how people would want to make sure he couldn't just wipe away a lot of that history.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:52.51] Exactly. So Congress passed a law, the Presidential Records and Materials Preservation Act, that allowed the federal government to take custody of Nixon's presidential records.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:11:03.79] And then they started to think, well, what do we do in the future? We need to make sure we don't get into this problem again. And out of that came then the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which says if the material that is accumulated by the presidency during the course of the administration is related to constitutional and statutory duties, it is the property of the people. The president can't take it away with him and treat it as private property. It then went into effect with the Reagan administration.
Nick Capodice: [00:11:39.89] So what are the logistics of this? How is a president supposed to handle the records?
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:11:44.27] The act requires the president to make all reasonable effort to separate at creation the personal from the public so that at the end of the administration there isn't a mass of which is which.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:59.18] There's a White House records office that starting on Inauguration Day, manages records throughout the presidency. They're in charge of making sure records are stored correctly, labeled as presidential or private, and communicating with the National Archives. However, the National Archives have the final say on whether a record is presidential or private.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:19.85] So what happens to something once it has been designated an official presidential record? How does it get from the White House to the National Archives?
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:12:28.85] Well, some material starts to come over during the presidency if there's material that the president doesn't need anymore. And if you know that the end of an administration is coming, that is the eight years, then you can start making plans quite early about moving material over.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:47.72] A lot of this material is electronic, which has its own process for being transferred from the White House to the National Archives. But there are also a lot of records that the National Archives and the White House need to pack up and move, usually to a National Archives facility and maybe eventually to a presidential library.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:13:06.74] It's very complicated and it's slow because you have to make sure that all the national security things are protected. If there is classified material in there, it is handled at the right level of security. The people in the National Archives have all the security clearances to handle it. And so the right people in the archives handle it. They have the storage that is able to handle classified, whether it is paper format or electronic format.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:35.21] Okay. There are two things here that I want to note. The first is that classified material or any potentially sensitive information has its own process for how it should be handled outside of the Presidential Records Act, The act is still relevant because any individual president, once they leave office, does not have private ownership over records created as part of doing their job. But there are additional restrictions and laws that are above and beyond the Presidential Records Act. If those records have classified or sensitive material.
Nick Capodice: [00:14:06.59] Well, that makes sense.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:07.94] The other thing is digital records, emails, tweets, any kind of social media. If it is business of the government, it is considered a government record.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:14:18.77] So if in the future we started creating records on pancakes, we'd save the pancakes.
Nick Capodice: [00:14:29.45] What about communications with other agencies? Like if the FBI or the CIA sends the president a memo? Is that memo something that falls under the Presidential Records Act?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:40.73] We'll talk about that right after the break.
Nick Capodice: [00:14:43.22] But before that break, if you're a fan of stuff like FOIA and the Presidential Records Act, you're probably going to be a fan of our newsletter. It's called Extra Credit. It's Free. It comes out every two weeks. It's fun. And you can sign up at our website, civics101podcast.org. We're back. You're listening to Civics 101. We are talking about internal communications with the White House and other government agencies. So, Hanna, if someone from the State Department, for example, emails the president, is that a State Department record or a presidential record?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:20.76] Well, it's kind of both. This is Margaret Kwoka. She's a law professor at Ohio State University, where she focuses on laws around government documents and access to government information.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:15:32.40] The Presidential Records Act itself specifically excludes official records of an agency.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:39.18] There's another statute, the Federal Records Act, that created a system for handling government documents. What needs to be saved and archived? How the information should be treated and how it can be accessed by the public. So records in all other agencies of government fall under that law.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:15:56.28] Now, as a practical matter, the problem comes in where agencies, of course, often create records that are part of the agency's official records and then transmit those records to the president for the information or use by the president or the president's advisers and staff. And so the question is, what happens to those records? And the truth is, this hasn't been sort of brought up in the courts very often. And now, of course, with everything being electronic, it's not like the records are either here or they're there. Right. The agency has a copy, the President's office has a copy, and there hasn't been a lot of litigation about, you know, are these copies treated separately? Do they have to be returned? How do we handle them going forward? Because mostly those records that end up being used by the president's office with all the other presidential materials are simply transmitted to the archives in the normal course of the end of a president's term. The way this has been going on, you know, mostly without problems since the Presidential Records Act was enacted. And so we haven't had a chance to sort of get into these finer distinctions of, well, you know, do some of these records that are going back and forth have to be treated under one or under the other of these laws? Because the archives is simply taking custody of them and proceeding as it normally would, to archive to provide access where required under the law and to serve that function as the official record of the government.
Nick Capodice: [00:17:32.78] So the takeaway here is that if there is a record in the White House, whether or not it was created there or brought there from another agency or came from the public, if it has anything to do with the federal government operations, including the duties of the president, vice president or any of the operations of their offices, it is not personal. It does not belong to that individual president.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:54.53] Right.
Nick Capodice: [00:17:55.16] So I feel like we're sort of getting around to the elephant in the room right now, which has to do with how former President Donald Trump handled his records. But I'm also wondering, can presidential records ever be destroyed?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:08.36] Yes, but it is not up to the president to decide what can be destroyed. It's up to the National Archives. Here's Trudy Huskamp Peterson again.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:18:18.80] The president can destroy records, but first he must go to the archives and say to the archivist, This is what we plan to destroy. Is this okay? Now this comes typically out of the White House records office, but on behalf of the president and the archives will look at it and say yes or no.
Nick Capodice: [00:18:37.10] I like the idea of a president showing up at the National Archives with a box being like, Hey, would you guys be cool if I destroyed this? So what kind of records would the archives actually be okay with destroying?
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:18:50.69] Usually it's things like absolutely routine letters from constituents or email from constituents in which you get 20,000 and they all say the same thing because they're part of a, you know, a campaign by someone. And so the archives will typically say a sample of those so that you can see that it came in. We'll save the evidence of the number of those that came in and then say, okay, you know, if you keep getting this same message over and over and over again, yeah, go ahead. You also allow the destruction of things like buying food for the White House mess and gas for limousines and so forth. So, sure, there have to be destructions during the presidency, but it's it is much, much more routine matter than it is highly sensitive or politically interesting material.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:47.09] All right. In 1998 alone, President Clinton got over a million emails and 2.2 million letters from the public. So that's about 5400 letters a day, just truckloads of mail.
Nick Capodice: [00:20:01.52] All right. So what happens when the records are turned over to the National Archives if they now all belong to the public? Do we just automatically get access to them?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:10.55] Not quite. The public won't have access to presidential records for five years, and the outgoing president can request certain information be stored without public access for even longer.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:20:21.26] There is a provision that allows a sitting president before he leaves office to identify certain materials that he would like to have restricted up to 12 years. And all the presidents that I am aware of have done so. And one further element is that if these materials are needed for purposes of litigation, for appropriate congressional use, the previous president, whose records they are, is notified. The incumbent president is notified, and if they do not object, then those materials are made available for those very narrow purposes.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:04.50] Essentially, if Congress or the Justice Department want access to presidential records of a former president that are still not publicly available, it's under the jurisdiction of the sitting president to decide if they should be released.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:21:17.91] I think it is important that people understand that you're not trying to block the current activities of government. And, you know, in some ways, activities carry on from one administration to another. The Covid crisis is an example, and you want those records to be available to the incoming administration so they understand what's been done, where they're going and so forth.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:41.82] But that does make me wonder, how does anyone know what kind of information even exists, not just Congress or the Justice Department, but the archives themselves? Like, how would the National Archives know that they have all the records they're supposed to or if anything is missing?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:59.79] Well, Trudy said that part of being an archivist is knowing what information you should expect to get. Creating a catalog, basically. So when a president is leaving office, there's a sense of what's there and what isn't.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:22:13.80] What you do is you understand the organization of the institution that you're trying to document. And you look and you say, Do I have all the records of the office of the secretary? Do I have all the records of the office of the social secretary? Do I have all the records of. And if you don't have one of the big chunks, then you say, Whoops, where is it? Where is this gone? Then you start to take a look further in that and you say, Look, I don't have stuff from this period. I don't have anything from May of something to August. What happened? Why isn't there anything there? You may have also basically a filing list. Think of email and you have a whole set of categories and you move your email into them and you look at that and you say, whoopsie, there's a category there and there's nothing in it. Why is that? Where is that? Or you say, I should have something from every country in the world. World leaders. I don't have any of them from this country or that country. Where is this? So it's that way you do it. You don't sit there and go through page by page and say, Gee, I don't have an answer to this document. That would be impossible given the volume we're talking about. So you look at it structurally.
Nick Capodice: [00:23:36.77] So Trudy is saying that before the National Archives even start getting records, they've got an idea of what they should have. And there's a pretty good chance that they're going to notice if something's missing, right?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:47.99] Exactly.
Nick Capodice: [00:23:49.01] So what if they do realize that some records are missing? What powers do they have to get them back?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:54.65] Trudy says that the National Archives themselves don't have any real enforcement power, but if they think records might be missing, they first try to get them back from the president and then they can escalate to the Justice Department. And I think now might be a good time to talk about former President Trump, who has been charged with mishandling sensitive government information and obstructing justice in a case over official government documents he removed from the White House after his presidency ended.
Archival Audio: [00:24:25.59] Thank you for joining us. I'm Nancy Cordes, in for Norah tonight. A federal judge has unsealed the warrant that authorized the search of former president Donald Trump's Florida home, Mar a lago.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:36.84] And as we talked about earlier, the National Archives usually have a pretty good idea of what they should be getting at the end of a president's term. So they realized that Trump had not returned some material.
Nick Capodice: [00:24:48.90] Wait, hold on. At one point, didn't Donald Trump invoke the Presidential Records Act to justify taking the documents in the first place?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:56.04] He did. He said that he had the right as president to declare that. Grids in the White House were personal and therefore his property.
Nick Capodice: [00:25:04.02] Even though the Presidential Records Act says that the National Archives are the ones who determine if something is personal or presidential.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:25:11.01] Yeah. Here's what Trudy had to say about that.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:25:13.71] Well, he was wrong on practically every interpretation of the Presidential Records Act. He had no right to take the records. He had no right to keep them. And he should have obeyed the law.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:25:26.22] And Trudy isn't alone. Many scholars, archivists and lawyers agreed that Trump's interpretation of the Presidential Records Act was wrong. Here's Margaret again.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:25:36.63] I mean, first off, you know, think that's not in dispute, really. You know, presidents leave office. They leave their official powers behind. Right. And that happens at noon on Inauguration Day. The other piece of it is that, you know, the Presidential Records Act, if we're sort of talking about that half that half of this issue, it actually specifies procedures for taking account of former presidents interests, but does not give them the ultimate authority to make a decision about access to records. It gives that ultimate authority to make a decision to the current sitting president because the interests that are being protected are the institution of the presidency, not the individual president. Right. And so, um, you know, it contemplates a role for input on certain issues of a former president. If records are requested and haven't been made public, but does not give them the authority to make the ultimate decision.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:26:33.49] And here's the thing. The issue the Justice Department had was not about whether the records Trump took were presidential or not. It was about the fact that some of those documents contained classified information, which is a whole other complicated matter entirely, one with much more serious legal implications. And by the way, we will have an episode on classified documents and what they mean in this case soon.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:26:59.23] The Presidential Records Act actually says nothing about criminal penalties for mishandling classified information. So it obligates a president to transmit their official records to the archives at the end of their term and to maintain records to not destroy them during their term. So that's one set of obligations, but that's not the obligation that is alleged to be violated in the indictment, which is under a totally separate statutory provision that concerns conduct that poses a risk to the security of the United States. In terms of mishandling classified information.
Nick Capodice: [00:27:31.96] So the Presidential Records Act wasn't even really part of this whole issue in the first place.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:36.34] The process of turning over government documents, the thing that a president is expected to do at the end of their term is what set this off. The National Archives realized that certain things were missing and that some of those things were classified and everything snowballed from there.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:27:54.52] So the Presidential Records Act was not invoked in the criminal investigation or in the indictment. What it is that is at issue, you know, mostly the charges concern violations of what is known as the Espionage Act. This is a World War one era law, which, although it sounds like it's about spying, is actually mostly about the handling of national defense secrets. In the past, it's mostly been used to prosecute leakers. So folks who have access to government secrets and who leak them either to the public or to the press, but it also has been used against individuals who have access to government secrets and have mishandled them. And that's the provision of the law that's at issue in the indictment against former President Trump. And specifically, that provision says, you know, someone who has access to these kinds of national defense secrets and willfully retains them or fails to deliver them in a way that is essentially mishandling those secrets. And that's the piece that is most at issue. There's also a couple of charges that are concerning obstruction of justice. So interfering with the investigation itself and another ancillary matters. But most of the charges are really about simply mishandling national defense secrets.
Nick Capodice: [00:29:22.42] Okay. So while there might be a problem with Trump keeping records that weren't his, the bigger legal problem in the eyes of the Justice Department was that some of those records contained sensitive national security information that Trump mishandled after he left office. Yeah.
Margaret Kwoka: [00:29:38.74] So it's it's really the creation of risk that that this provision is intended to address where someone who has access to these secrets is keeping them in unsecured locations, keeping them longer than they're entitled to have them in ways that, of course risk someone accessing those secrets because they're not being properly stored. So that's really what's at issue in the indictment. The reason the Presidential Records Act keeps coming up in these conversations is because there's been sort of a theory floated out there that actually the relevant law shouldn't be the Espionage Act, but should be the Presidential Records Act and that law. Does, in fact, govern president's conduct, but is not the only law that governs president's conduct. And so I think one way of thinking about this is, you know, all people, including presidents, have obligations that stem from different different legal provisions. Right. It's not like we only have one law that applies to us. And so, yes, there are obligations that stem from the Presidential Records Act. Those just aren't the ones that are alleged to be violated in this case. And so that's why here, you know, the Presidential Records Act just doesn't really bear on these charges.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:59.09] And like we've said already, we'll talk in a later episode about the legal provisions around classified documents. But even though the Presidential Records Act was not invoked in the criminal charges against Trump, it's still important to this story because it says that presidential records are public property that should be valued and protected. And Trump did not treat those records the way they were expected to be treated.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:31:24.50] Let me say one thing about the press coverage. The press has focused heavily on the national security documents that were found in Mar a Lago and apparently in Bedminster. Um, but in my view, it's a different issue. Is the fact that the president took public property and did not obey the law. And it is both the classified material, but it's also the unclassified that he took. And this is unacceptable, I think, for a democratic system which relies on goodwill of people to follow the law.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:32:07.31] And even the work of archiving is changing. There are still norms that presidents are expected to adopt.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:32:14.63] The idea of the physical presidential library now is changing. President Obama decided he did not want to have one that was run by the National Archives. And so, unlike his predecessors since Hoover, his presidential records are in the custody of the National Archives but are in a National Archives facility, not a presidential library.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:32:41.12] Obama did not set up a traditional presidential library, but he still made plans with the National Archives to ensure there would be a system for them to be made available to the public in the future. What Trump did is different.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:32:54.77] When President Trump was in office, to the best of my knowledge, he did not make any provisions for where or whether he wanted to have such a facility. And so at the end of the administration, the records came to the National Archives, which are managing them. He complained or one of his surrogates complained that it was the National Archives fault because they didn't move the records down to Florida where they knew he was going to be living. Mistake. That isn't the way it works. The president has to determine where he wants such a facility and the president or the president and his friends have to construct such a facility and make it available for the operation of the National Archives. So that was just a backwards view of how these facilities get constructed in various places.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:33:50.19] Sometimes breaking from the norms isn't a bad thing. Perhaps presidential libraries are evolving as the footprint of presidential records evolves. That also means that future generations will understand this moment in history only through the lens of what we right now value enough to preserve.
Trudy Huskamp Peterson: [00:34:10.11] The value of the presidential library system as it has operated prior to Obama, was that the libraries also went out and obtained a lot of material from other people in the administration, other private sources and things from the president's family associates, often from political leaders that were involved in the administration and brought all that together as one place where researchers could come and look at the presidents, see in large terms whether or not that will go on with the Obama and Trump changes is hard to know at this point.
Archival President Clinton: [00:34:59.87] We have a way to save money through streamlining that does not require us to deprive our children of food. Instead, instead of cutting food, we're going to cut the cutlery. And here's how with a spork. You know, I don't know how many of you know that I've been eating off these things for years.
Archival President Clinton: [00:35:19.48] I never knew they were called sporks.