Not that NSA, the other one. That NSA already has all this stuff.
What could have been the destruction of evidence and further obstruction by what is sadly now the Republican, has been prevented by a lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Read the entire article.
Washington, D.C., February 11, 2021 – The National Security Archive et. al. v. Donald J. Trump et. al. lawsuit, filed December 1, 2020 to prevent a possible bonfire of records in the Rose Garden, achieved a formal litigation hold on White House records that lasted all the way through the transition and Inauguration Day, the preservation of controversial WhatsApp messages, and a formal change in White House records policy.
The Archive worked with co-plaintiffs – the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) and the American Historical Association (AHA), as well as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) – to bring the case under the records laws, against President Trump, the Executive Office of the President, and the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA).
The lawsuit argued that Trump White House policy that only saved via screen shots the instant messages of government business – such as Jared Kushner’s negotiations with Saudi prince bin Salman – failed to capture the complete record that the law required. Plaintiffs pointed to repeated media accounts of White House failures to preserve records, including President Trump’s reported ripping up of documents in the Oval Office, former aide Steve Bannon’s use of disappearing instant messages to communicate with campaign embeds at the agencies, private email use by Ivanka Trump and other top officials, and the routine use of encrypted WhatsApp messages by Kushner and others.
Justice Department lawyers defending against the lawsuit have informed plaintiffs that White House records managers have now successfully deployed an archival tool in the WhatsApp software to capture full copies including links and attachments of the WhatsApp threads in Kushner’s account and other WhatsApp users at the White House.
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As a result of press accounts and the Archive v. Trump lawsuit, the Trump White House Counsel’s office warned staff three times during the transition, on November 19, December 14, and January 7 (!), to preserve all presidential records including any official business messages on their personal devices in their original electronic form. Effectively, the Counsel’s office had rescinded its own prior policy, dating back to 2017, that a screen shot was good enough...