Citizens for Ethics: “A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction today requiring Trump administration officials to follow the Presidential Records Act and preserve text messages, including Signal messages, pertaining to its work, in response to a motion filed and argued by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington on behalf of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and CREW. Following an Office of Legal Counsel opinion declaring the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional and President Trump free to ignore it, the White House Counsel circulated a memo to staff saying that they should only preserve text message communications carrying out official business on personal accounts and devices when those messages constitute the only record of an official action or are otherwise “unique.” The memo also instructed staff that not even text messages that meet these vague criteria need to be preserved if they deal with what individual staffers believe to be “ministerial” acts or office minutiae, no matter how important they turn out to be, and encouraged staff to memorialize their text messages in emails or memos instead of saving them as required by law. This guidance raised significant concerns that certain presidential records were not being preserved, especially given the destruction and hoarding of records in the first Trump administration. The court affirmed those concerns in its order, writing that adopting “the government’s position that the Act is unconstitutional would disable Congress and future Presidents from reflecting on experience, in defiance of the very words engraved on the National Archives Building in Washington: ‘What is past is prologue.’ See William Shakespeare, The Tempest act 2, sc. 1. And while the presidency is a singularly important institution, that gravity does not free it from modest constraint. Quite the opposite. Each branch of government derives its authority from the trust placed in it by the People, and Congress has validly determined that this Act helps to maintain that trust by shining some light on the activities of the President and his aides.”
Today’s order is a significant win for transparency and accountability,” said CREW President Donald Sherman. “President Trump and his administration have acted illegally as though presidential records are theirs to destroy or hoard at will. The law is clear: those records, including work texts and messages on personal phones, are the property of the United States and the American people. The court’s decision will ensure that those records are preserved and kept from being forever lost to history. We look forward to continuing to defend the Presidential Records Act and preserving the public’s right to presidential records that help ensure accountability for corruption and transparency for all Americans.
