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Over the past year, President Trump has bulldozed through multiple restraints on his power. He has fired watchdogs, dismantled entire agencies and declared emergencies to impose tariffs and mobilize troops. Now he is shrugging off a law that Congress passed to preserve White House papers, and historians are taking him to court. NPR's Carrie Johnson reports.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: The story begins more than 50 years ago in July 1974, when a unanimous Supreme Court ruling became the nation's top story.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: President Nixon has not yet responded to the sledgehammer decision of the Supreme Court today, which ruled that he must immediately turn over tapes of 64 presidential conversations.
JOHNSON: Sixteen days after that NBC news report, Richard Nixon left the White House.
TIMOTHY NAFTALI: And thus began a struggle between Richard Nixon and the United States and led to a complete rethinking of the nature and the ownership of presidential materials.
JOHNSON: That's scholar Timothy Naftali. He says Nixon wanted to take his presidential papers home to California, so Congress passed a law to make clear the federal government owned those papers, not Richard Nixon. Four years later came another law that applied to future U.S. presidents. Since 1978, administrations led by both Republicans and Democrats have largely honored the Presidential Records Act until now. This month, the Justice Department declared the records law is unconstitutional because it violates the separation of powers. Gene Hamilton worked in the Trump White House as a lawyer.
GENE HAMILTON: The notion that the United States Congress gets to tell the president of the United States what he gets to do with his paperwork is, from a constitutional perspective, insane.
JOHNSON: Hamilton now runs the nonprofit America First Legal, which backs strong executive power. He says the records law burdens the White House for no good reason. The American Historical Association and the watchdog group American Oversight could not disagree more. They're taking the Trump administration to court. This week, they asked a federal judge to block the White House from destroying papers and messages. Loree Stark is one of their lawyers.
LOREE STARK: What's really important here is the risk of loss of documents crucial to understanding American history.
JOHNSON: Another lawyer, Dan Jacobson, says the Trump administration is defying both Congress and the judicial branch. He says the Supreme Court found an earlier version of the records law was constitutional in another case from the Nixon era. But the Trump Justice Department memo disregarded that precedent.
DAN JACOBSON: They're pretty transparent. They say, we just think the Supreme Court is wrong. They use the word wrong several times. So the executive branch is taking for itself the authority to declare that the Supreme Court got it wrong and that they can ignore a law based on that disagreement.
JOHNSON: Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, says President Trump is committed to preserving records from his historic administration, and he'll maintain a rigorous records retention program. But watchdogs aren't so sure about that. They point to this episode chronicled in a local Fox TV report.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: In breaking news, the FBI has executed a search of former President Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida.
JOHNSON: The FBI said it found highly classified documents in a bathroom, a ballroom and an office. The Justice Department prosecuted the former president for obstructing justice, but DOJ dropped an appeal after Trump won the 2024 election. Trump said those papers were his. Historians say Trump's trying to justify his behavior with his new approach to the records law. Matthew Connelly teaches at Columbia University.
MATTHEW CONNELLY: But in America, I think most of us have now come to understand that the president works for us, right? The papers, the records of the decisions they make on our behalf - those are our papers. That's our history.
JOHNSON: Timothy Naftali, the scholar and former head of the Nixon Library, says the court battle echoes far beyond the present moment.
NAFTALI: This is about whether we can hold our most powerful leader accountable. And I don't know how you hold them accountable if they can destroy the record of their actions in government.
JOHNSON: Both sides could appear in court as early as next month. Carrie Johnson, NPR News.
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