Another Presidential Lawsuit
Two groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, CREW, and the National Security Archive, have filed a lawsuit against the president, arguing that he “appears to be violating the Presidential Records Act and the Constitution’s requirement that the president ‘take care’ that the laws be faithfully executed.”
The groups specifically allege that the president has gone on a campaign to destroy tweets and that administration officials regularly use other means of correspondence, such as special apps that automatically delete read emails. The apps also allow for private communications among top staff that effectively cut the public and the press out from learning of the goings on of the president.
Interestingly, President Trump once accused Hilary Clinton of her own deletion problem.
In other words, there appears to be a deliberate White House effort to wash all historical records of potentially difficult conversations and plans, violating the law as a result.
It is possible that we may be able to add yet another charge, and lawsuit, to the president’s growing list: the willful destruction of presidential documents and related records. This may now be added to the mounting evidence of Trump’s possible collusion with a foreign power and subsequent obstruction of justice charges as well as a host of other lawsuits brought against this administration.
Secret Communications
The law suit alleges that in evading “transparency and government accountability,” through secret communications practices, the administration is
knowingly prevent[ing] the proper preservation of records the Defendants generate or receive . . . [and are] usurp[ing] . . . agency duties and responsibilities by consolidating power in the White House.
This of course, like so many other internecine scandals of the young Trump administration, is serious. The simple truth in all this is no one would go out of their way, especially not the President of the United States, to destroy records of conversations and other documents if they were not attempting to hide an unsavory truth from the public—a truth that may well lay out strategy or even complicity in any number of on-going investigations.
The Covfefe Act
But Mike Quiggly, the Illinois Rep who co-sponsored the acronymic Mar-a-Lago Act, recently introduced the Covfefe Act, named after the president’s recent mistweet, is aimed at making all of Trump’s tweets and social media posts from his personal accounts fall under the official presidential record.
These communications would, therefore, be governed by the 1978 Presidential Records Act, an act that governs the preservation, maintenance, and dissemination to the public of all the president’s communications. And the Rep and his fellow sponsors have also cleverly turned “covfefe” into a legitimate acronym: “Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement.”
Deleting Tweets and the Archivist of the US
And the reason for all of the hub bub over Mr. Trump’s social media behavior is of course that he has deleted quite a few of his tweets. ProPublica, for instance, has documented reams of such deletions, and they span his personal and even his official social media platforms.
So, in other words, the president may already be in violation of the Constitution and the Presidential Records Act.
But the archivist of the United States suggested something very interesting that may imply that a records preservation duty already exists, no matter the platform on which the president communicates. David Ferriero, the archivist, urged in a memo to members of Congress that administration officials “’capture and preserve all tweets that the President posts in the course of his official duties.’”
In the Course of His Official Duties
That part about tweeting or otherwise communicating on social media “in the course of his official duties” may be the phrase that implies that the president has a “duty to preserve” when the communication is related to official presidential business, no matter where it originates.
The president apparently deleted a tweet about a Mar-a-Lago meeting in which the president met with top military brass, then tweeted about it and subsequently deleted it, violating, according to the CREW lawsuit, the Presidential Records Act.
The Inevitable Day of Reckoning
In the end, there is a clear and unmistakable pattern of secrecy and information concealment in the White House that goes all the way to the top and appears to be intensifying. This administration daily restricts media access to the president and his administration, deletes presidential tweets across all social media platforms, and has no problem with lying to or misleading the American public about its business.
Eventually, the Trump administration will be laid out for accounting and scrutiny and will be forced to explain these alarming assaults on the public trust.
