Archivists Say National Security at Risk After Trump Flouts Records Law

Kathianne BonielloAug 27th, 2026, 8:41 am
 
National archives

National Archives

President Donald Trump‘s administration is endangering national security by flouting the Presidential Records Act, six former national archivists have claimed.

The half a dozen official record keepers, who served as Archivists of the United States under Republican and Democratic presidents going back to Bill Clinton, argued in a court filing Wednesday that the nation’s very continuity of government is at stake.

Those who signed the court filing, known as an amicus brief, include: Trudy Huskamp Peterson; John W. Carlin; David S. Ferriero; Debra Steidel Wall; Colleen Shogan and William J. Bosanko, according to CNN.

Gary M. Stern, a former general counsel for the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, also signed on.

The Presidential Records Act is critical to maintaining “continuity of governance,” the group argued.

“Preserving presidential records ensures that new leaders can have immediate and ongoing access to the data, strategy, and rationale behind past policy decisions,” the group said in the court filing.

The most “frequent request for preserved presidential records comes from the incoming president’s national security advisors,” they noted, according to the network.

The record keepers threw their support behind a group of presidential scholars and others who have sued the administration after the Justice Department said it didn’t need to follow the PRA, calling the long-standing act unconstitutional.
The Presidential Records Act was established in the wake of Watergate and seeks to preserve the nation’s most important documents.
Trump was notoriously investigated, and his Florida compound, Mar-a-Lago, was raided after he was found to have taken classified documents from his first term.
The scandal led in part to the appointment of independent prosecutor Jack Smith, who was tasked with probing Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election and later said he found “powerful evidence that showed President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.”

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