Historians Sue Trump Administration Over Scheme to Gut Presidential Records Law

Trump Wants to Make Presidential Records Disappear. Historians Are Fighting Back.

A group of historians has taken the Trump administration to court over what they describe as a transparent attempt to give the president a free pass to steal, destroy, or hoard official government records -- just like he did after his first term.

The lawsuit, reported by Lawfare's Anna Bower, challenges an Office of Legal Counsel opinion claiming the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. That 1978 law, passed in the wake of Watergate, requires presidents to preserve their official records and turn them over to the National Archives when they leave office. Until Trump, no president had a problem with this basic transparency requirement.

The historians are asking the court to declare the PRA constitutional and to block Trump from taking presidential records when his term ends. They also want the court to force disclosure of any instances where Trump has already destroyed, converted for personal use, or failed to maintain records as required by law.

Why This Matters: The Mar-a-Lago Precedent

This is not a hypothetical concern. After Trump left office in 2021, federal investigators discovered that boxes containing thousands of documents -- many of them highly classified -- had been improperly removed from the National Archives to Mar-a-Lago, Trump's private club and residence in South Florida.

Special counsel Jack Smith brought federal charges against Trump for the illegal retention of classified documents. But a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, dismissed the case on dubious legal grounds. After Trump won re-election in 2024, the Department of Justice declined to appeal.

At the time, Trump falsely claimed the PRA allowed him to take whatever documents he wanted. In reality, the law requires the opposite: that presidential records belong to the public and must be preserved.

Gutting Post-Watergate Reforms

The Presidential Records Act was part of a suite of reforms enacted after the Watergate scandal to prevent presidents from hiding their dealings from public scrutiny. As historian Jan-Werner Mueller wrote for The Guardian, "no one up until Trump appeared to have experienced [the PRA] as remotely burdensome."

Now, the Trump administration's Office of Legal Counsel is arguing the law itself is unconstitutional -- a move that would effectively give Trump unlimited power to destroy evidence of corruption, self-dealing, or criminal conduct.

The historians' lawsuit seeks more than just a declaration that the PRA is valid. It asks the court to enjoin Trump and other defendants "from retaining, destroying, disposing, or otherwise handling Presidential records in a manner not in accordance with the PRA" and to force Trump to "turn over all Presidential records in his actual or constructive possession to NARA as required by the PRA."

Accountability vs. Impunity

This case is about whether a president can operate above the law -- whether Trump can use the power of his office to erase the evidence of how he used that power.

The Mar-a-Lago documents case already showed what happens when Trump faces no consequences for flouting transparency laws: he does it again, more brazenly. Now, instead of just breaking the law, his administration is trying to eliminate the law itself.

The historians filing this suit understand what is at stake. Presidential records are not Trump's personal property. They belong to the American people. And if Trump succeeds in gutting the PRA, future presidents will have a roadmap for operating in total secrecy -- destroying evidence, hiding corruption, and escaping accountability.

That is not how democracy works. That is how authoritarianism works.