Presidential Records Act

Specifically, the Presidential Records Act:

• Defines and states public ownership of the records.
• Places the responsibility for the custody and management of incumbent presidential records with the President.
• Allows the incumbent president to dispose of records that no longer have administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value, once he or she has obtained the views of the Archivist of the United States on the proposed disposal in writing. [3]
• Establishes a process for restriction and public access to these records. Specifically, the PRA allows for public access to presidential records through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) beginning five years after the end of the Administration, but allows the President to invoke as many as six specific restrictions to public access for up to twelve years. The PRA also establishes procedures for Congress, courts, and subsequent administrations to obtain special access to records that remain closed to the public, following a 30‑day notice period to the former and current Presidents.
• Requires that Vice-Presidential records are to be treated in the same way as presidential records.
• Establishes that Presidential records automatically transfer into the legal custody of the Archivist as soon as the President leaves office. [3]
• Establishes procedures for Congress, courts, and subsequent Administrations to obtain “special access” to records from NARA that remain closed to the public, following a privilege review period by the former and incumbent Presidents; the procedures governing such special access requests continue to be governed by the relevant provisions of E.O. 13489
• Establishes preservation requirements for official business conducted using non-official electronic messaging accounts: any individual creating Presidential records must not use non-official electronic messaging accounts unless that individual copies an official account as the message is created or forwards a complete copy of the record to an official messaging account. (A similar provision in the Federal Records Act applies to federal agencies.)
• Requires that the President and his staff take all practical steps to file personal records separately from Presidential records.
• Prevents an individual who has been convicted of a crime related to the review, retention, removal, or destruction of records from being given access to any original records.

• Executive Order 12667 – issued by President Reagan in January 1989, this executive order established the procedures for NARA and former and incumbent Presidents to implement the PRA (44 U.S.C. §§ 2201–2207).
• Executive Order 13233 – this executive order, issued by President George W. Bush on November 1, 2001, supersedes the previous executive order. The Bush executive order also includes the documents of former Vice Presidents.[4]
• Executive Order 13489 – issued by President Barack Obama on January 21, 2009, restored the implementation of the PRA of 1978 as practiced under President Reagan's Executive Order 12667 and revoked President Bush's Executive Order 13233.[5][6]

In June 2018, Politico reported that President Donald Trump frequently and routinely would tear up papers he received, resulting in government officials taping them together for archiving to ensure that Trump did not violate the Presidential Records Act.[7]

In July 2018, Business Insider reported that President Trump gave his personal cellphone number to various world leaders, having unrecorded conversations with them completely without U.S. officials' knowledge.[8]

In July 2018, CNN reported that The White House had suspended the practice of publishing public summaries of President Donald Trump's phone calls with world leaders, bringing an end to a common exercise from previous administrations.[9]

In May 2019, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the National Security Archive, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration alleging that President Donald Trump and senior advisers such as Jared Kushner were failing to meet their legal obligations under the Presidential Records Act to create and to preserve records of top-level meetings with foreign leaders.[10][11]

In October 2019, an outgoing information security officer warned that with the transfer to the White House Communications Agency, political appointees would be in charge of electronic records.[12]

In December 2020, a group of historians sued (National Security Archive v. Trump, 20-cv-03500, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia) the Trump administration over its failure to preserve historical records in violation of the Presidential Records Act. Specifically they claimed that Jared Kushner was in violation of the Act by taking screen shots of his WhatsApp posts that do not include metadata, attachments, or other digital artifacts needed to authenticize the information.[13][14] In January 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court instructed the lower courts to dismiss the CREW v. Trump case (and a similar case brought by Maryland and the District of Columbia) as moot, because Trump was no longer president.[15]

Executive branch appointees have been held in contempt of Congress for not turning over documents when requested.[16]

In February 2022, it was revealed that 15 boxes of documents containing important records from his presidency, such as communications, gifts, and letters from world leaders, had been recovered from Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence by the National Archives the previous month. This suggests that Trump used his Florida home to retain possession of presidential documents in possible violation of the Presidential Records Act.[17][18] Some of the recovered documents were marked as classified, including some at the "top secret" level.[19]

• Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007, passed by the House on March 14, 2007.
• Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement Act of 2017, named after President Trump's "covfefe" tweet

• Bush White House e-mail controversy
• Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014
• Records management

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Presidential Records Act of 1978

• Presidential Records at the U.S. National Archives