Harry Litman - License to Shred

If it didn’t escape notice altogether, the news that the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel has issued an opinion declaring the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional likely didn’t rock your world. The subject matter seems arcane, and the story is a wash of D.C. acronyms: PRA. OLC. GSA. NARA.

But stay with me, because what happened last week—buried under the avalanche of news about Iran, Bondi, and the Pope (the Pope—WTF?!)—may be the single most ominous move the Trump Administration has yet made to erase history and substitute a false and hagiographic portrait of his conduct in both terms. What hangs in the balance is no less than the extremely well-established principle that presidential records belong to the American people and must be scrupulously preserved.

The law that governs preservation of White House records is the Presidential Records Act (”PRA”). For a long time, outgoing presidents turned over their records to the Library of Congress as a matter of principle, ensuring access for historians and the public. That principle hit a brick wall during the Nixon Administration, when Nixon, under siege, moved to take control of the tapes and arrange for their eventual destruction.

Nixon’s concealment and defiance of subpoenas for the tapes became central to the impeachment proceedings. The obstruction count, the contempt count, and the damning 18-and-a-half-minute gap in a critical recording all flowed from his effort to keep the records from public view. It was that crisis that prompted Congress to act, giving rise to the enduring image of Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, contorting herself into what the press dubbed the “Rose Mary Stretch” as she demonstrated to a grand jury how she might have accidentally erased it.

https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/license-to-shred