Nothing In AP’s Presidential Records Act Hit Piece On Trump Is True: If Trump Wants to Restore the Trust in Our Government That was So Badly Damaged Under Biden, He Must Comprehensively Reform the Government’s Records Management Ecosystem

Nothing In AP’s Presidential Records Act Hit Piece On Trump Is True:

If Trump Wants to Restore the Trust in Our Government That was So Badly Damaged Under Biden, He Must Comprehensively Reform the Government’s Records Management Ecosystem.

On May 20, the Associated Press published an article titled “The future of history: Trump could leave less documentation behind than any previous U.S. president.” As a federal records management consultant with more than 25 years of experience supporting White House and agency records management at all levels of the government, I can assure you nothing in this article is even remotely true.

Let’s begin with the article’s opening claim: “For generations, official American documents have been meticulously preserved and protected … safeguarding snapshots of the government and the nation for posterity.” While this may have been true decades ago when almost all government records were maintained on paper, it has not been true in the digital age.

Both the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and the Federal Records Act (FRA) require records born digitally to be managed through each phase of their lifecycle — creation, distribution, use, maintenance, and disposition — in their native electronic formats. These records must be maintained in systems that ensure their integrity, authenticity, and provenance, and apply an archivist of the United States-approved retention schedule that prevents their premature destruction by anyone.

Over the course of my career, I have supported the management of billions of electronic government records. During that time, I have never seen a single White House or agency electronic record managed through its lifecycle in compliance with the PRA or the FRA. Not one. The government claims to be doing it, but they are not.

Though this may be hard to believe, it is demonstrably true. It is also something I am willing to swear to under oath. The Associated Press’s claim that the government has “meticulously preserved and protected” federal records in the past is simply not true.

The article also asserts that the Trump administration “sought to expand the executive branch’s power to shield from public view key administration initiatives” by utilizing apps like Signal, which can “auto-delete messages containing sensitive information rather than retaining them for record-keeping.”

However, the article fails to note that Signal’s auto-delete feature is optional and can be turned off. Moreover, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) approved Signal for government use under General Records Schedule 6.1 during the Biden administration. It is also not the president’s job to manage the lifecycle of White House electronic messages in compliance with the PRA. That work is delegated to the White House Office of Records Management (WHORM), which is part of the Executive Office of the President and operates under the Office of Administration.

The article further claims that the FBI raid on President Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, was due to the president’s refusal to return classified records to the National Archives. But NARA had no right to claim ownership of the paper printouts of the electronic records that the president stored at his estate. —>READ MORE HERE

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