DC Circuit Weighs Trump Claim He Owns White House Papers — SkimNews
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- The Trump administration will argue before the D.C. Circuit on Friday that White House papers belong to Trump personally, not the public, in a case legal observers expect the administration will try to push to the Supreme Court.
- The Justice Department moved six months ago to invalidate the Presidential Records Act, a 1978 law passed after disputes over Nixon's records that every president since has followed.
- U.S. District Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled against the White House earlier this year and opened his decision with an Orwell "1984" passage: "Who controls the past controls the future."
- Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which brought the suit, warned through chief counsel Nikhel Sus that a ruling for the administration would be "a major loss for archivists, historians and...the American people writ large."
- White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis declared the Presidential Records Act "unconstitutional and a clear violation of the separation of powers."
- Former NSC legal adviser John Bellinger, who served under George W. Bush, said losing access to those papers would leave future presidents at a "terrible disadvantage" on continuity of government and foreign-leader communications.
- Conservative lawyer Michael Edney, who also worked for Bush's NSC and Justice Department, said the administration's goal is to get the case to the Supreme Court "at a time of their choosing" — though he conceded Congress could likely pass a "thoughtful" alternative records-preservation statute.
Why it matters: If the D.C. Circuit or Supreme Court sides with the administration, the post-Watergate norm of public access to presidential records — followed by every president since 1978 — effectively ends, letting future presidents withhold their own papers indefinitely. Edney's own observation that the White House wants this at the Supreme Court "of their choosing" suggests the case is a deliberate legal strategy rather than a one-off dispute.
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