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Accusations are flying fast and furious regarding last week’s FBI raid at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. In my Wednesday piece for The Post, I noted that 30 million pages of Obama administration records had been trucked to Chicago. The Obama Foundation, working with the National Archives, promised to digitize and put them online. Almost six years after the records arrived at a Chicago-area warehouse, that hasn’t happened.
Trump revved up the controversy Friday when he asserted that Barack Obama “kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified. How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!”
Trump has not revealed any source for his allegations that many of the papers were classified and that they had “lots” of “nuclear” material. The Obama Foundation and the National Archives have denied there are any classified documents in those records.
The media have largely sainted the National Archives in this ruckus. The agency issued a statement Friday: “As required by the [Presidential Records Act], former President Obama has no control over where and how [the archives] stores the Presidential records of his Administration.”
But the National Archives blocks access to official records at the behest of every former president and his designated officials.
Almost all the media coverage of this controversy has ignored or downplayed the dismal failure of the Presidential Records Act to reveal presidents’ records. A analysis of the dispute on the 30 million pages conceded, “As with many issues of government transparency and document-sharing, it’s true that this is not great! You often have to wait years for requested documents, and this appears to be no exception.
