Coming up, on the road to now.

There's this really interesting sort of new tradition of trying to skirt around Presidential Records Act issues

by actually taking meetings outside of the White House or having phone calls outside of the White House.

And Obama actually has gotten a little bit of press about this,

where reporters will see him taking meetings with lobbyists and special interest groups,

but just right down the street, right?

So that they don't have to sign in.

And so their names are not a part of the public record. On a day-to-day basis, not a lot of people rallying around the concept of public records

for the future of history, right?

There's not a lot of like, we gotta just keep it so that historians can eventually write accurate

and detailed accounts of our doings.

On the last day of Reagan's administration, there was a lawsuit filed by Scott Anderson,

who's the founder of the National Security Archive, George Washington.

Great guy, journalist, worked with the Watergate scandal, published a book with Bob Woodward.

He sued the government, made a FOIA request, because email

was technically not considered a public record at that point. And so he, as a historian, as you can

imagine, was very worried about exactly what you're talking about, about essentially having

an entire administration's worth of

communication disappear because the format wasn't specified in public law.

I'm Bob Crawford.

And I've been Sawyer and this is the road to now.

Ben, I'm in Kent Washington today and just outside. And my cousin who lives here told me earlier

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