Because they recorded a lot of their conversations, historians and even ordinary citizens have an amazing amount of insight into what went on behind the scenes during the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. When we add in the voluminous reports that Congress produced during investigations in the mid-to-late 1970s, and the massive amount of declassification that has occurred over time and as a direct result of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, we all have the great good fortune of knowing much more about the inner working of our government in the 1960’s and 1970’s than people did at the time.
This hasn’t really helped the reputations of the presidents who served in that era, and recording certainly didn’t work out well for Mr. Nixon. Presidents since that time have been more careful about what they preserve for prosecutors and posterity’s review. But they’re still required to safeguard nearly everything they touch and to turn it over to the National Archives. This obligation is set down in a law called the Presidential Records Act that was passed in 1978 and went into force the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated for the first time.
The digital era has ironically made the preservation of Executive Branch records more challenging. We saw this with Hillary Clinton’s emails from her time as Secretary of State and we saw it as well during the administration of George W. Bush. The mingling of personal and official business on government phones and email and chat systems creates a headache, and the mingling of official business and political business creates landmines for compliance with the Hatch Act.
The Bush administration ran afoul of the Presidential Records Act when they provided RNC email services to members of the administration and encouraged them to conduct all political business on those “non-governmental” accounts. Predictably, a lot of official business was conducted on RNC email (often by design to maintain secrecy) and about twenty-two million records were initially lost in the process and unavailable for congressional inquiries and oversight.
To comply with the law, presidents have small teams to preserve records and make sure they are safeguarded. One group is responsible for monitoring the president’s paperwork in the White House and even on the road. They collect it and send it over to a crew in the Old Executive Office Building that Trump inherited from President Obama and Obama inherited from President Bush. The OEOB records management analysts collate everything and send it to the National Archives.
Unfortunately for these recordkeepers, Donald Trump came into the presidency with a habit of tearing up any document that displeased him or that he considered no longer of any use. So, the job of collating presidential records quickly became more like a third grade art class.
“We got Scotch tape, the clear kind,” [Solomon] Lartey recalled in an interview. “You found pieces and taped them back together and then you gave it back to the supervisor.” The restored papers would then be sent to the National Archives to be properly filed away.
Lartey said the papers he received included newspaper clips on which Trump had scribbled notes, or circled words; invitations; and letters from constituents or lawmakers on the Hill, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“I had a letter from Schumer — he tore it up,” he said. “It was the craziest thing ever. He ripped papers into tiny pieces.”
Lartey did not work alone. He said his entire department was dedicated to the task of taping paper back together in the opening months of the Trump administration.
One of his colleagues, Reginald Young Jr., who worked as a senior records management analyst, said that during over two decades of government service, he had never been asked to do such a thing.
“We had to endure this under the Trump administration,” Young said. “I’m looking at my director, and saying, ‘Are you guys serious?’ We’re making more than $60,000 a year, we need to be doing far more important things than this. It felt like the lowest form of work you can take on without having to empty the trash cans.”
In March and April, respectively, Solomon Lartey and Reginald Young Jr. were summarily terminated without cause and escorted off the White House grounds. They still have no idea what they did wrong and were told only that they served at the pleasure of the president. It’s possible that they were victims of a plumbing job looking to plug leaks.
The cause of their terminations is a separate concern, however, from the proper preservation of presidential records. Several decades from now, historians and ordinary citizens will be sifting through the Trump administrations’ records, just as they often look back today at the records from JFK, Johnson, and Nixon. What they’ll see is a lot of documents that have been pieced back together with Scotch tape.
By that time, memories of the president’s childishness may have faded, but this will be an eternal reminder.
If they want a reminder of the president’s criminality, they may want to look at different documents:
Prosecutors are sifting through every shred of evidence against President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen — literally.
During a hearing Wednesday regarding the FBI’s raid on Cohen’s law office and residences, Assistant U.S. Attorney Rachel Maimin revealed the government was piecing together documents from a paper shredder.
“I don’t believe the contents of the shredding machine are voluminous at all,” Maimin said.
Once reassembled, the shredded papers will be turned over to Cohen’s legal team as part of an ongoing review of his material for attorney-client privilege.
Hopefully, the FBI has a better system for preserving those records than Scotch tape.
“The Bush administration ran afoul of the Presidential Records Act …”
One of my pet theories is that those of us who don’t understand power talk a lot about ‘laws’ and ‘norms,’ while them who do focus exclusively on consequences.
More evidence that Trump has virtually no knowlege or understanding of the job he’s supposed to be doing. And because he brought along with him a team of equally incapable idiots, no one understands what needs to be done. And by firing those who do know, Trump and his Administration will continue to destroy any semblance of rules, law, and order in our government.
And they don’t care at all. Bannon is laughing every day.
In the last three years of WW2 Hitler had also filled his ranks with untalented yes men while he ran wild. Like trump he was a full blown ego maniac without any common sense.
This isn’t too much of a surprise for the CEO of FailedNation, Inc.; indeed, compliance with the Records Act would have been surprising. In the bigger picture, transparency in government and preservation of the actions of leaders was/is an extreme ideal, which can be accomplished only in robust democracies, an ideal which is now far beyond our failing and de-evolving society. But it should also be noted that the two democratically illegitimate electoral college prezes of the 21st century are also the ones that have refused to follow the Records Act. (They are also Repubs, of course. No surprise there)
This puts them in the camp of authoritarian strongmen such as Hitler and Stalin, who also made sure that very few records concerning their most extreme crimes ever materialized. Thus one cannot “prove” by actual records that Stalin ordered the mass starvation of Ukraine or the liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia, nor Hitler’s ordering of the Final Solution (for example).
Der Trumper is (so far) a political criminal of a lesser order (although he now has his GICEtapo taking cues from the Nazi extermination camps as they separate parents from their children). But Trumper instinctively knows when a record of his actions should not be kept, as all criminals do.
Presumably there could be some plaintiff(s) such as the Association of American Historians or even Congressional Dems who could challenge Der Trumper’s Records Act lawbreaking in court, but it would likely just end in an illegitimate 5-4 Supreme Court decision supporting Repub Trumper. And every 5-4 decision with Gorsuch in the majority is an illegitimate decision which some future (fantasy) Court should overturn purely on that ground.
The law in FailedNation, Inc. has failed as well. But there can be no real surprise in that. We are now a government of men, not laws. That is what the incompetent white electorate wanted, as they cheer every lawbreaking action of Der Trumper.
. . . “de-evolving”. An 80s(?) music ensemble even, er, “made a name for themselves” out of it.
For Cohen, it would seem he likes to preserve his missives, perhaps feeling they will protect him or even enhance his abilities to blackmail, much like the tapes. Lucky us.
For Trump, he seems to have sincere distain for the written word, fear it will entrap him and lo and behold it probably will.
“What’s funny about this is that the media decided the most important issue facing the country in 2016 was Hillary Clinton’s compliance with information security best practices. Well, not ha-ha funny.”
Scott L,
Lawyers, Guns, and Money.
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Not to make light of the problem, but there are ways of recovering missing documents. A message sent by e-mail is in most cases archived automatically by the sender. Also, a very high percentage of government communications are cc’d and automatically archived by the recipients. So if you know, or have good reason to believe, that a document exists, you have a good chance of finding it even if it was destroyed by the principal recipient. Not to mention data recovery technology. Not to mention data surveillance by some agencies whose very name I dare not speak.
Of course this involves a lot of extra work by archivists and technicians and only works with known unknowns rather than unknown unknowns. Although there is always serendipity. Sometimes you find just one thing you didn’t expect, and that may provide clues to things you previously had no idea of.
He appears to be destroying paper drafts and pieces of paper with his handwriting on them. Think 1975.
He’s not a digital age person—his sub-literate tweets included!
. . . to this becoming public knowledge (and, I’m betting, first-time knowledge to him as well — i.e., that documents he’s shredded get pieced back together and archived), by simply lighting a match and dropping it into the receptacle where he just deposited the document he just tore up?
“Pretty good” is my best guess.
You think we’ll still be around several decades from now?
I agree. So many blithely assume we will. I’m old. I’ve seen too much. As a result I’m not optimistic at all. I now believe ignorance is the motive historic force.