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President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before departing on Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House, Thursday, April 16, 2026, in Washington (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta).
A lawsuit has been filed to permanently prevent the Trump administration from overturning a long-established legal obligation to keep presidential records, amid fears that President Donald Trump might “destroy or sell” such documents.
This new legal challenge was initiated by the liberal watchdog organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), alongside the Freedom of the Press Foundation, adding to the numerous lawsuits already facing the administration.
The lawsuit names Trump, Vice President JD Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the National Archives (NARA), and acting Archivist Edward Forst as defendants. It requests that a federal judge in Washington, D.C., rule the administration’s policy of “non-compliance” with the Presidential Records Act (PRA) as “unlawful” and invalid.
The lawsuit highlights the origins of the PRA, noting, “President Nixon used his official authority to illegally target his perceived political foes and then attempted to destroy evidence of his wrongdoing. The PRA was established to correct the legal deficiencies that allowed such abuses.”
Despite this, T. Elliot Gaiser, Assistant Attorney General at the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel, argued in an April 1 memorandum that Trump’s dismissed Mar-a-Lago classified documents case illustrates why presidential records should be categorized as personal rather than public property.
The opinion criticized “attempts […] to subject a former President to criminal liability for his handling of presidential records that, for most of this Nation’s history, would have been subject to his complete discretion” — that is, until Watergate. And it went as far as to assert that Congress’s answer to Richard Nixon-style abuses of power and corruption was “invalid in its entirety.”
For the plaintiffs, the Trump administration’s “nonsensical” green light for itself to defy the PRA and Supreme Court precedent attempts to “return the country to a pre-Watergate status quo,” opening the door for the president to “destroy or sell” presidential records “at will.”
“By adopting the OLC Opinion and illegally defying the PRA, Defendants have returned to a status quo rejected nearly a half century ago, where records of the President’s and White House’s official conduct are private property of the President that he can destroy or sell at will, even the most consequential official acts need not be documented, and the public and Congress will only ever see the documents that the President wishes to show them,” the lawsuit added. “Defendants’ unlawful actions pose a real and immediate threat that Presidential records will be irrevocably destroyed and forever lost to history.”
Congress enacted the PRA in 1978 — four years after Nixon lost the Watergate tapes case at the Supreme Court and resigned in disgrace. The act gave the United States “complete ownership, possession, and control” over presidential records, requiring that the chief executive “adequately” document “activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of the President’s constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties” for their submission to the NARA.
Senior U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, has been assigned the case at the outset, the docket shows.