Liberal Forum

jerrab » 28 Jun 2023, 10:10 pm » wrote: ↑

28 Jun 2023, 10:10 pm

---------------------------------CLAIM: The Presidential Records Act gives a president the right to take any record when leaving office and declare them personal.THE FACTS: That’s a flagrant misreading of the law, legal experts say.The law, which took effect in 1981, requires the preservation of White House documents as property of the U.S. government.Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, said that the notion that a president could declare any record as personal goes against the “very reason” the law was created. NARA is the federal record-keeper and the agency that repeatedly sought the documents kept by Trump.Congress passed the act in 1978 in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, when a collection of secret tapes that President Richard Nixon had considered destroying played a defining role.