More than a dozen state attorneys general have warned Donald Trump’s administration to preserve presidential records, including Twitter posts, along with “emails from private servers” used for government communication and notes from conversations.
The group of Democratic attorneys general – led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is also pursuing an investigation into the president’s business and his associates – sent a letter to White House counsel Pat Cipollone on Wednesday urging the president to comply with the Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act over concerns that the administration has sought to destroy records on its way out the door.
“The Trump Administration shouldn’t have to be told that they need to comply with the law and keep all records of official business, but the last four years have shown that the president needs to be constantly reminded what the law is and how he must comply with it,” Attorney General James said in a statement.
Fifteen states’ attorneys general – from Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Virginia, Washington and Washington DC – signed on to the letter.
Attorney General James specifically mentioned that Mr Trump’s Twitter posts, notes from conversations with Russian resident Vladimir Putin, and Ivanka Trump’s "private email server must be archived.”
“Every bit of this information belongs to the American people and the White House cannot deprive the public of this information,” she said.
The letter follows lawsuits and demands from watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which joined a lawsuit with the National Security Archive, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the American Historical Association.
CREW warned that the US faces “an increasing risk that historically valuable records of his presidency will be permanently lost in violation of records laws.”
The group said this month that the White House has effectively permitted the loss and subsequent destruction of presidential records by allowing White House personnel to capture and preserve only portions of electronic messages they send or receive on unofficial messaging accounts."
"This is part of a larger pattern of the President and the White House ignoring, if not flouting, their obligation to create and preserve records memorializing official actions and decisions,” CREW said in a statement.
The group’s executive director Noah Bookbinder said that “the American people deserve not only to know how their government is making important decisions, but to understand what was going on behind closed doors and what we could do better in the future."
The group has also requested communications between the National Archives and Records Administration “and any social media platform company, including but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, Google, Skype, Slack, Signal and Parler” on the preservation of presidential records.
In a pair of 2017 memos, White House counsel reminded staff of “their obligation to preserve and maintain presidential records” and stressed that “willful destruction or concealment of federal records is a federal crime punishable by fines and imprisonment.”
