“There is no way to read that statutory language as giving the president ‘discretion’ to categorize military plans, to take just one example, as ‘personal’,” Chafetz wrote in an email.ĬLAIM: A case involving Bill Clinton keeping audio tapes in a sock drawer proves that Trump’s actions were legally sound. Prosecutors allege, for example, that Trump showed off a classified map of a foreign country while discussing a military operation. Josh Chafetz, a professor at Georgetown Law, agreed, saying there’s “simply no way” the records described in the indictment against Trump could be considered “personal” under the act’s definitions.Īmong the documents found at Mar-a-Lago were ones marked “SECRET” or “TOP SECRET.” The documents included details about the country’s nuclear weapons and the nuclear capabilities and military activities of other countries. “Any record that touches on information relevant to presidential decisions on foreign policy or national security is a presidential record. “The definition of ‘personal records’ is narrow, clear, and functional: it includes only records of a ‘purely private or nonpublic character’,” Peter Margulies, a professor at Roger Williams University’s School of Law in Bristol, Rhode Island, wrote in an email. The law, he and other experts note, clearly distinguishes between “presidential records” and “personal records.” NARA is the federal record-keeper and the agency that repeatedly sought the documents kept by Trump.Ĭongress 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. 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.

The law, which took effect in 1981, requires the preservation of White House documents as property of the U.S. THE FACTS: That’s a flagrant misreading of the law, legal experts say. “The crucial legal precedent is laid out in the most important case ever on this subject, known as the Clinton socks case.”īut legal experts say Trump’s description of the law - which isn’t mentioned in the charges against him - is wrong and contrary to its very purpose, while the 2012 legal case involving Clinton isn’t a sound comparison to Trump’s current legal predicament.ĬLAIM: The Presidential Records Act gives a president the right to take any record when leaving office and declare them personal. “Under the Presidential Records Act - which is civil, not criminal - I had every right to have these documents,” Trump claimed in a speech Tuesday night, hours after he pleaded not guilty to dozens of felony counts accusing him of hoarding classified documents and refusing government demands to give them back. To hear former President Donald Trump tell it, taking and withholding classified documents was perfectly consistent with federal law and a decade-old legal case involving former President Bill Clinton.

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