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A2 UP FRONT
Monday 5 SepteMber 2022
America's secrets: Trump's unprecedented disregard of norms

Continued from Front national intelligence from must be preserved. dentiary value" can be dis- in a White House complex
2007 to 2009. That law was enacted after posed of before obtaining bathroom.
As more details emerge FBI agents who searched Nixon resigned from office the archivist's written per- That approach is out of
from last month's FBI search Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in the midst of the Water- mission. step with how modern-day
of Trump's Florida home, on Aug. 8 found more than gate scandal and sought to Documents have been re- presidents have operated.
the Justice Department 100 documents with clas- destroy hundreds of hours covered from Trump's bed- Obama, while writing his
has painted a portrait of an sification markings, includ- of secretly recorded White room, closet, bathroom White House memoir after
indifference for the rules on ing 18 marked top secret, House tapes. It established and storage areas at his leaving office, had paper
a scale that some thought 54 secret and 31 confiden- government ownership of Florida resort, which dou- records he used in his re-
inconceivable after estab- tial, according to court fil- presidential records start- bles as his home. In June, search delivered to him in
lishment of the Presidential ings. The FBI also identified ing with Ronald Reagan. when Justice Department locked bags from a secure
Records Act in 1978. 184 documents marked as The act specifies that im- officials met a Trump law- National Archives storage
"I cannot think of a his- classified in 15 boxes re- mediately after a president yer to retrieve records in re- facility and returned them
torical precedent in which covered by the National leaves office, the National sponse to a subpoena, the in similar fashion.
there was even the sus- Archives in January, and it Archives and Records Ad- lawyer handed them doc- Dwight Eisenhower, who
picion that a president or received additional clas- ministration takes legal and uments in a "Redweld en- left office years before
even a high-ranking of- sified documents during a physical custody of the velope, double-wrapped the Presidential Records
ficer in the administration, June visit to Mar-a-Lago. outgoing administration's in tape." Act was passed, kept offi-
with the exception of the An additional 10,000 other records and begins to work Trump has claimed he de- cial records secure at Fort
Nixon administration, pur- government records with with the incoming White classified all the documents Ritchie, Maryland, even
posely and consciously or no classification markings House staff on appropriate in his possession and had though there was no re-
even accidentally remov- were also found. records management. been working in earnest quirement for him to do so.
ing such a sizable volume That could violate the Presi- According to the National with department officials Neil Eggleston, who served
of papers," said Richard dential Records Act, which Archives, records that have on returning documents as White House counsel
Immerman, who served as says that such records are no "administrative, histori- when they conducted the during the final years of the
assistant deputy director of government property and cal, informational, or evi- Mar-a-Lago search. During Obama administration, re-
the 2016 campaign, Trump called that Fred Fielding,
asserted that Clinton's use who held the same posi-
of her private email server tion in the George W. Bush
for sensitive State Depart- administration, advised him
ment material was disquali- as he started his new job
fying for her candidacy; to hammer home to staff
chants from his supporters the requirements set in the
to "lock her up" became a records act.
mainstay at his political ral- Similarly, Trump's White
lies. House counsel, Donald
James Trusty, a lawyer for McGahn, sent a staff-wide
Trump in the records mat- memo in the first weeks of
ter, said on Fox News that the administration under-
Trump's possession of the scoring "that presidential
sensitive government ma- records are the property of
terial was equivalent to the United States."
hanging on to an "overdue "It's not a hard concept
library book." that documents prepared
But Trump's former attorney during the course of our
general, Bill Barr, said in a presidential administration
separate Fox News inter- are not your personal prop-
view that he was "skepti- erty or the president's per-
cal" of Trump's claim that sonal properties," Eggleston
he declassified everything. said.
"People say this (raid) was Presidents are not required
unprecedented -- well, it's to obtain security clear-
also unprecedented for ances to access intelli-
a president to take all this gence or formally instruct-
classified information and ed on their responsibilities
put them in a country club, to safeguard secrets when
OK," Barr said. they leave office, said Larry
Trump's attitude about Pfeiffer, a former CIA of-
White House records is not ficer and senior director of
so surprising to some who the White House Situation
worked for him. Room.
One of Trump's national se- But guidelines issued by the
curity advisers, John Bolton, Office of the Director of Na-
said briefers quickly learned tional Intelligence, which
that Trump often tried to oversees the intelligence
hang onto sensitive docu- agencies, require that any
ments, and they took steps "sensitive compartmented
to make sure documents information" –- some of
didn't go missing. Classified the highest-value intelli-
information was tweeted, gence the U.S. possesses
shared with reporters and –- be viewed only in secure
adversaries — even found rooms known as "SCIFs."q