Does Trump have ‘the right to take things’? Even the law he keeps citing says no.

Since federal agents searched his Florida home last year, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he had the right to take documents with him when he left the White House.

Its reason for being? The Presidential Records Act of 1978enacted in the wake of Watergate after a costly fight with former President Richard Nixon over his own documents and records.

Trump says this law gives him a “right” to he white house records brought Mar-a-Lago after leaving the presidency, which in turn were the subject of his accusation last week. In a speech in Georgia on Saturday, Trump defended himself by saying, “As president, all of my documents were subject to what is known as the Presidential Records Act” and could only be “tried” by it.

It is not the first time that he has cited the law: in his town hall appearance on CNN on May 10Trump said he had “every right” to take the papers.”under the Presidential Records Law”.

“I was there and I took what I took and they declassified it,” Trump said. “I had every right to do it, I did not hide it. You know, the boxes were parked outside the White House, people were taking pictures.”

But the reality is just the opposite.

The Presidential Records Act makes it quite clear who owns presidential records, defined as materials created or received by the president or his staff in the performance of their official duties, and not the president: “The United States shall reserve and retain ownership , possession and control of presidential records; and such records shall be administered in accordance with the provisions of this chapter.”

“I don’t know how to make it more clear that these are the records of the people of the United States,” said Trudy Huskamp Peterson, who spent two years as acting United States archivist in the 1990s and has been a consulting archivist since 2002 in Washington. .

Peterson said that’s not just his opinion, but a widely shared opinion in both the legal and archival fields. “The definition of presidential records should not have been made with a distinction of personal records if they were all personal at the time they were created, and they were not,” he said.

“The Presidential Records Act (PRA; 44 USC §§2201-2207) established public ownership of records created by presidents and their staffs in the performance of their official duties,” the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said in a 2019 report.

“The PRA also established procedures for congressional and public access to presidential and vice presidential information and the preservation and public availability of such records at the end of a presidency.”

The report goes so far as to note that the law is intended to explicitly remove ownership of a president’s presidential records. “The PRA fundamentally changed the status of presidential records as public property materials,” he said. “Prior to the enactment of the PRA, presidential documents were traditionally the private property of the president, who then donated the materials to institutions for public consumption.”

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which appears to have set the impeachment of Trump in motion by seeking the return of Trump’s presidential documents after he left the White House, has the same interpretation.

“The PRA changed the legal ownership of the President’s official records from private to public, and established a new statutory structure under which Presidents, and later NARA, must manage the records of their Administrations,” the agency said. it says on their website.

That is, suffice it to say, not exactly how Trump sees it.

“Remember this: This is the Presidential Records Act. I have the right to take things. told FOX News host Sean Hannity the 27th of March. “I have the right to look at things.”

And after his first indictment by New York state authorities in the Stormy Daniels secret money affair, Trump told a crowd of supporters at Mar-a-Lago he was just doing what the 1978 law expected.

“Just so everyone knows, I am subject to the Presidential Records Act, which was designed and passed by Congress a long time ago, for this reason alone. According to the law, I am supposed to negotiate with NARA,” he said, calling NARA a “problematic organization of the radical left” because of the investigation into him.

That statement attracted a rebuke from the Society of American Archiviststhe nation’s oldest and largest professional organization of archivists, which issued a statement disputing Trump’s claims about the PRA.

“It’s only when people try to undermine the provisions of the Presidential Records Act that we see courts and investigators become part of the disposition of records, records that are owned by the people of the United States. Any claim by any public official is not based on law or fact. They are fabrications,” the group said.

Peterson defended NARA, which he headed as the nation’s top archivist from 1993 to 1995. It was registered as politically independent then and now, and said archivists take their duty to be neutral when it comes to records very seriously.

She described NARA as “the most apolitical organization that tries to deal with highly political materials.”

“I think he is dead wrong,” Peterson said of Trump.

“And I don’t know if he is wrong because he lies and knows better or if he really believes that he is a king, not a president.”

But even if Trump’s claims about the Presidential Records Act were true, they wouldn’t matter with respect to the indictment unsealed Friday. in which the bulk of the charges, 31 charges, were made under the Espionage Act, for “deliberate withholding” of confidential defense information.

The 1917 law prohibits obtaining or copying national security information with the intent to use it to harm the United States or help another country. None of Trump’s charges were related to the civil law of the Presidential Records Act.

There is a small exception within the PRA for purely personal records such as diaries, diaries or materials that have no relation to or impact on the functions of officials. But the materials at the center of the Justice Department case do not appear to be such documents.

According to the indictment, the documents originated from various agencies in the US intelligence community, including the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, as well as the Departments of Defense and Energy.

Peterson said she is disappointed by the focus on classified documents alone.

“I would really like to see some recognition that it’s not just classified documents that are the problem here. The problem here is taking property away from people,” he said.