Judge halts White House’s rollback of presidential records-retention policies

By Katelyn Polantz, Tierney Sneed, CNN

(CNN) — A federal judge said Wednesday that White House staff must preserve their official records, including communications that they send via non-official text message services, pushing back on attempts to free President Donald Trump from record-keeping obligations that were set by Congress.

The 54-page opinion from Judge John Bates of the DC District Court, puts on hold an attempt by the administration to roll back the Presidential Records Act, which was a major reform following the Watergate scandal and the state of then-President Richard Nixon’s records.

“Congress has the enumerated power to regulate presidential records,” Bates wrote.

“While the presidency is a singularly important institution, that gravity does not free it from modest constraint,” the judge added.

Yet Bates declined to put any restrictions directly on the president, the vice president, the National Archives and archivist, the Justice Department or the attorney general.

Still, the court proceedings are also likely to set up major additional challenges in the near future between the autonomy of the presidency, which Trump has extensively moved to expand during his second term in office, against the oversight ability of Congress and the enforcement powers of federal courts.

Attorneys representing presidential scholars, historians, the press and public transparency groups had argued to Bates that presidential records could be destroyed quickly absent court intervention.

“It could happen at any moment,” a lawyer for the American Historical Association and the group American Oversight told Bates in court last week.

Bates also wrote extensively about the history of the Presidential Records Act and the historical value of White House documents.

“The Act democratizes the history of an indispensable institution,” Bates wrote. “Access to those records allows future Presidents to pick up where their predecessors left off, Congress to identify inefficiency and misfeasance, and the public to learn from the mistakes of the past.”

DOJ memo kicks off records fight

The Trump administration launched its attack on the half-century-old Presidential Records Act with a memo last month from the Office of Legal Counsel, a Justice Department office that gives advice to the executive branch.

That internal opinion for the executive branch said the Justice Department concluded the law was unconstitutional. The opinion was shocking for a number of reasons, including for how it seemed to eschew Supreme Court precedent backing Congress’ power to regulate presidential record preservation.

Trump’s current White House counsel, David Warrington, in April issued internal guidance to the president’s staff, saying his guidance replaced the Presidential Records Act. The guidance came just days after the DOJ changed internal executive branch policy to say the Presidential Records Act was unsound, because it was congressional overreach.

Warrington, in his new guidance, didn’t mention the president or vice president’s own records at all. And the guidance only addressed the preservation of email and text messages, rather than all electronic records, which the PRA encompasses. The new guidance appears to leave out disappearing electronic communications like Signal chats, Bates said during his questioning of the attorneys.

Bates’ opinion Wednesday said that the guidance for when text messages should be preserved was out of step with what the law required.

A Justice Department attorney argued in court last week the “lion’s share” of presidential records are being preserved, because work being done by presidential staff on White House-issued phones is being kept. And the records of the president and the vice president are largely being handled by staff, though the president himself has “enormous discretion” on his own record-keeping, the government lawyer added.

Lawsuits shed light on status of Mar-a-Lago boxes

Recently in the presidential records dispute, the Justice Department had also revealed that some of the boxes of documents the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago in 2022 as part of the classified documents case against Trump had been returned to the president as his personal property.

That disclosure, last week in federal court in DC, was the first update in months on where the Mar-a-Lago boxes may be now. Some of those boxes had been returned to the National Archives and are still in the Archives’ control, the Justice Department and the Archives have said. Others were flown to Florida last February after Trump began his second term.

He said at that time the boxes “will someday be part of the Trump Presidential Library,” though he didn’t specify they would be in his personal possession, rather than maintained as official government documents.

The Mar-a-Lago documents include records from different parts of the government and classified records that were central to the now-dropped criminal national security mishandling case against Trump.

Trump’s belief that they were his boxes; that he had the ability to declassify at will; and that he could keep them in unsecured locations like his Florida resort, even after he was no longer president, were central to his criminal case. The case ended in 2024 when a federal judge in Florida nullified the authority of the prosecutor, then-special counsel Jack Smith.

It wasn’t known if any of the boxes back in Trump’s personal control still contained classified records, or if they were still being adequately preserved.

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