You will have to explain this 2012 court ruling if you want to prove your debatable claim:
“The [Presidential Records Act] does not confer any mandatory or even discretional authority on the archivist,” wrote U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in that 2012 ruling. “Under the statute, this responsibility is left solely to the president.”
David Super, another professor at Georgetown Law, argues the 2012 Clinton case has “absolutely nothing to do with” the charges Trump currently faces. For one thing, the court didn’t dismiss the case because it found that Clinton was entitled to keep the tapes, Super said. Jackson simply ruled that NARA could not turn over the tapes as public records because they were owned by the historian and not government property.
Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign didn’t respond to an email seeking comment, but the Republican and his allies have argued that the judge’s ruling in the case showed that the Presidential Records Act affords presidents complete discretion to delineate between personal and presidential records.
Legal experts this week also dismissed those arguments. Margulies, of Roger Williams University, said the claim “mixes apples and oranges.”
“The Clinton materials were audiotapes of conversations with an historian that incidentally recorded some calls on official business,” he wrote. “In contrast, the documents that Trump kept were all presidential records from the moment they arrived at the Oval Office from other parts of the government.”
Eric Freedman, a professor at Hofstra University’s School of Law in Hempstead, New York, also noted that a federal appeals court has already rejected similar arguments raised by Trump’s legal team as it sought to block the criminal investigation into the records found at Mar-a-Lago.
In either case, Super said, any discussion about the Presidential Records Act is “largely a red herring” because Trump doesn’t face charges of violating that law.
The indictment instead charges Trump with Espionage Act violations, as prosecutors argue the documents he kept could harm the country if obtained by adversaries.
apnews.com
