Watchdog Groups Sue Trump in Effort to Preserve Official Presidential Records

AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

President Donald Trump is being sued by a pair of watchdog groups in an effort to force him to comply with a presidential records preservation law.

The American Historical Association, the world’s largest professional organization for historians, and American Oversight, a nonpartisan group primarily focused on federal oversight, filed the lawsuit on Monday in response to an April 1 memo sent out by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

In the memo, the Justice Department argues the Presidential Records Act is “unconstitutional” for two reasons: “It exceeds Congress’s enumerated and implied powers, and it aggrandizes the Legislative Branch at the expense of the constitutional independence and autonomy of the Executive.”

Due to its declared so-called unconstitutionality, the memo determined Trump need not comply with the Presidential Records Act, which was enacted in 1978 as a set of rules for the custody and management of official White House records. It is designed to give ownership of the records to the U.S. government, not the president himself.

The lawsuit requests an injunction from the court to require the president to comply with the law upon leaving office for “the preservation of records that document our nation’s history, and whether the American people are able to access and learn from that history.”

However, the complaint also lists the “stakes” as “even greater.”

The groups argue in the lawsuit that the Trump Administration’s actions both nullify “a law duly enacted by Congress” and contravene “a decision of the Supreme Court.”

After Watergate, the Supreme Court ruled that former President Richard Nixon would be required to turn over 42 million pages of documents and hundreds of tape reels under the act.

“The Executive Branch has declared the power to override the legal determinations of the U.S. Supreme Court, in order to override the laws passed by Congress to preserve and provide public access to official records of the President’s activities,” the lawsuit cites. “The Executive Branch has nullified the determinations of the other two branches of government so that the President may claim these official government records to be his own.’

Both groups warn that Trump could personally keep the presidential records upon the completion of his second term. After his first term, it took months to retrieve approximately 300 classified documents that he had stowed away at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump was ultimately indicted on forty federal counts for the retention of these classified documents during the summer of 2023, but the case was dismissed by a judge one year later.

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