A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction today requiring Trump administration officials to follow the Presidential Records Act and preserve text messages, including Signal messages, pertaining to its work, in response to a motion filed and argued by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington on behalf of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and CREW.

Following an Office of Legal Counsel opinion declaring the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional and President Trump free to ignore it, the White House Counsel circulated a memo to staff saying that they should only preserve text message communications carrying out official business on personal accounts and devices when those messages constitute the only record of an official action or are otherwise “unique.” The memo also instructed staff that not even text messages that meet these vague criteria need to be preserved if they deal with what individual staffers believe to be “ministerial” acts or office minutiae, no matter how important they turn out to be, and encouraged staff to memorialize their text messages in emails or memos instead of saving them as required by law. This guidance raised significant concerns that certain presidential records were not being preserved, especially given the destruction and hoarding of records in the first Trump administration.

The court affirmed those concerns in its order, writing that adopting “the government’s position that the Act is unconstitutional would disable Congress and future Presidents from reflecting on experience, in defiance of the very words engraved on the National Archives Building in Washington: ‘What is past is prologue.’ See William Shakespeare, The Tempest act 2, sc. 1. And while the presidency is a singularly important institution, that gravity does not free it from modest constraint. Quite the opposite. Each branch of government derives its authority from the trust placed in it by the People, and Congress has validly determined that this Act helps to maintain that trust by shining some light on the activities of the President and his aides.” 

“Today’s order is a significant win for transparency and accountability,” said CREW President Donald Sherman. “President Trump and his administration have acted illegally as though presidential records are theirs to destroy or hoard at will. The law is clear: those records, including work texts and messages on personal phones, are the property of the United States and the American people. The court’s decision will ensure that those records are preserved and kept from being forever lost to history. We look forward to continuing to defend the Presidential Records Act and preserving the public’s right to presidential records that help ensure accountability for corruption and transparency for all Americans.”

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 and that the records of those official acts be preserved and eventually made available to the public, Congress and future presidents. For nearly 50 years and 11 presidential administrations, no president claimed the Presidential Records Act was unconstitutional. CREW and the Freedom of the Press Foundation are requesting that the court order a reversal of the White House’s unlawful adoption of OLC’s unprecedented and unsupported opinion.

“The American story belongs to all of us, and so do the records that tell it,” said Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy at The Freedom of the Press Foundation Lauren Harper. “Our collective history cannot be privatized, nor can it be locked away or destroyed by any single individual or office. Today’s order is a critical victory for transparency, and takes an important step in ensuring that presidential records remain exactly what they have been for nearly 50 years: public property.”

Read the order.
Read the opinion.