CREW and Freedom of the Press Foundation sue to defend the Presidential Records Act

Following the Trump administration’s adoption of a nonsensical opinion overturning nearly 50 years of precedent by the Office of Legal Counsel, CREW and Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) are suing President Trump, Vice President Vance, the Office of the Vice President, the White House, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and others to defend the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (PRA) and require adherence to the statute’s public ownership, recordkeeping and public disclosure requirements.

In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, when President Nixon attempted to destroy records and cover up his wrongdoing, Congress passed the PRA, requiring that official acts of the president and his staff be documented, preserved and eventually made available to the public. The PRA makes clear that presidential records are the property of the United States and the American people, not of any individual president—no matter how much he may wish to destroy the public record or hoard documents after he leaves office. 

For nearly 50 years and 11 presidential administrations, no president claimed the Presidential Records Act was unconstitutional. That all changed during President Trump’s second term. President Trump’s first term included numerous record-keeping scandals, culminating in multiple indictments for his handling of classified documents after leaving office. He now simply wants to ignore the PRA altogether, but his struggles in complying with the law have nothing to do with the law’s constitutionality and only show how important it is. 

On April 1, 2026, at the White House Counsel’s request, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued an opinion stating that the PRA is “unconstitutional because it exceeds Congress’s enumerated and implied powers and aggrandizes the Legislative Branch at the expense of the constitutional independence and autonomy of the Executive.”

The following day, on April 2, without ever having challenged the PRA in court, the White House adopted a new recordkeeping policy that relied on this erroneous OLC opinion to end compliance with the PRA. The White House is now flagrantly violating the law and flouting the requirements Congress enacted to ensure public transparency. It is clear that the Trump administration wishes it could return the country to a pre-Watergate status quo in which records of the president’s and White House’s official conduct are the private property of the president—records he can destroy, sell, or withhold from the public at will—but that is not reality. 

Trump and his administration must comply with laws passed by Congress, or face accountability in court. CREW and the Freedom of the Press Foundation are requesting that the court order a reversal of this illegal policy and that the Trump administration fully comply with the PRA during litigation. As the complaint states: “Defendants’ unlawful actions pose a real and immediate threat that Presidential records will be irrevocably destroyed and forever lost to history.” That cannot be allowed to happen.